Concept
Eusocialité
Publications associées (21)
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 ...
EPFL2024Targeted 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 ...
2024Biohybrid 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 ...
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 ...
EPFL2022Social network plasticity decreases disease transmission in a eusocial insect
Alessandro Crespi, Laurent Keller
Animal social networks are shaped by multiple selection pressures, including the need to ensure efficient communication and functioning while simultaneously limiting disease transmission. Social animals could potentially further reduce epidemic risk by alt ...
2018Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects
Laure Menin, Oksana Riba Grognuz, Laurent Keller
Social insects frequently engage in oral fluid exchange trophallaxis between adults, and between adults and larvae. Although trophallaxis is widely considered a food-sharing mechanism, we hypothesized that endogenous components of this fluid might underlie ...
Elife Sciences Publications Ltd2016Effects of ploidy and sex-locus genotype on gene expression patterns in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta
Chitsanu Khurewathanakul, Oksana Riba Grognuz, Laurent Keller
Males in many animal species differ greatly from females in morphology, physiology and behaviour. Ants, bees and wasps have a haplodiploid mechanism of sex determination whereby unfertilized eggs become males while fertilized eggs become females. However, ...
Royal Soc2014Variable Threshold Algorithm for Division of Labor Analyzed as a Dynamical System
Division of labor is a widely studied aspect of colony behavior of social insects. Division of labor models indicate how individuals distribute themselves in order to perform different tasks simultaneously. However, models that study division of labor from ...
Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2014