Concept
Insect
Related publications (116)
A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics
Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...
EPFL2024Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies
Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan
Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...
2024Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency
Mahmut Selman Sakar, Laurent Keller, Fazil Emre Uslu
Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...
2024An Autonomous Robotic Platform to Manipulate Collective Behavior in Ants
Eusocial life is characterized by division of labour, collective decision making and self organization, and regarded as the highest form of social organisation in groups. Ants are a model organism for research in collective behavior and the evolution of eu ...
EPFL2023Robotic manipulation to investigate the physical principles of biological self-organization
Self-organization is the spontaneous formation of ordered patterns and networks from a population of comparatively simple elements or individuals with no prior information on neither the formation process nor the final organization. While the construction ...
EPFL2022Growth, timing, & trajectory of vortices behind a rotating plate
The presence of aerodynamic vortices is widespread in nature. They can be found at small scales near the wing tip of flying insects or at bigger scale in the form of hurricanes, cyclones or even galaxies. They are identified as coherent regions of high vor ...
EPFL2022Rapid molecular evolution of Spiroplasma symbionts of Drosophila
Bruno Lemaitre, Florent François Masson
Spiroplasma is a genus of Mollicutes whose members include plant pathogens, insect pathogens and endosymbionts of animals. Spiroplasma phenotypes have been repeatedly observed to be spontaneously lost in Drosophila cultures, and several studies have docume ...
MICROBIOLOGY SOC2021Dual proteomics of Drosophila melanogaster hemolymph infected with the heritable endosymbiont Spiroplasma poulsonii
Bruno Lemaitre, Samuel Rommelaere, Fanny Schüpfer, Florent François Masson, Alice Marra
Insects are frequently infected with heritable bacterial endosymbionts. Endosymbionts have a dramatic impact on their host physiology and evolution. Their tissue distribution is variable with some species being housed intracellularly, some extracellularly ...
2021Effects of wing kinematics, corrugation, and clap-and-fling on aerodynamic efficiency of a hovering insect-inspired flapping-wing micro air vehicle
A flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FW-MAV) operating with aerodynamically optimal wing configuration and kinematics may save energy and thus prolong flight time. In this work, we use a computational-fluid dynamic method to investigate the effects of wing k ...
ELSEVIER FRANCE-EDITIONS SCIENTIFIQUES MEDICALES ELSEVIER2021Transformation of the Drosophila Sex-Manipulative Endosymbiont Spiroplasma poulsonii and Persisting Hurdles for Functional Genetic Studies
Bruno Lemaitre, Chloé Christiane Laurence Jollivet, Florent François Masson
Insects are frequently infected by bacterial symbionts that greatly affect their physiology and ecology. Most of these endosymbionts are, however, barely tractable outside their native host, rendering functional genetics studies difficult or impossible. Sp ...
AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2020