Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Concept

Eusociality

Related publications (19)

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

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 ...

EPFL2024

Targeted 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 ...

Nature Research2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Rafael Botner Barmak, Robert Matthew Mills, Raphael Cherfan, Louis Arnaud Vahé Piotet

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 ...

2024

An Autonomous Robotic Platform to Manipulate Collective Behavior in Ants

Matthias Rüegg

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 ...

EPFL2023

Robotic manipulation to investigate the physical principles of biological self-organization

Fazil Emre Uslu

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 ...

EPFL2022

Insect-Inspired Visual Perception for Flight Control and Collision Avoidance

Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur

Flying robots are increasingly used for tasks such as aerial mapping, fast exploration, video footage and monitoring of buildings. Autonomous flight at low altitude in cluttered and unknown environments is an active research topic because it poses challen ...

EPFL2019

Social network plasticity decreases disease transmission in a eusocial insect

Laurent Keller, Alessandro Crespi, Nathalie Isabelle Karine Anne Stroeymeyt

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 ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2018

Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects

Laurent Keller, Laure Menin, Daniel Ortiz Trujillo, Oksana Riba Grognuz

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 Ltd2016

Effects of ploidy and sex-locus genotype on gene expression patterns in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta

Chitsanu Khurewathanakul, Laurent Keller, Oksana Riba Grognuz

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 Soc2014

Variable Threshold Algorithm for Division of Labor Analyzed as a Dynamical System

Inaki Navarro Oiza

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

Evolution of division of labor in artificial societies

Pawel Lichocki

Natural and artificial societies often divide the workload between specialized members. For example, an ant worker may preferentially perform one of many tasks such as brood rearing, foraging and nest maintenance. A robot from a rescue team may specialize ...

EPFL2013

Limitations of response thresholds models of division of labor

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

High levels of cooperation are often cited as the primary reasons for the ecological success of social insects. In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how wor ...

The MIT Press2012

Neural networks as mechanisms to regulate division of labor

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how work is allocated among individuals. It has been suggested that workers choose a task by responding to stimuli gath ...

2012

Task-dependent influence of genetic architecture and mating frequency on division of labour in social insect societies

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Division of labour is one of the most prominent features of social insects. The efficient allocation of individuals to different tasks requires dynamic adjustment in response to environmental perturbations. Theoretical models suggest that the colony-level ...

Springer Verlag2010

Teamwork in Self-Organized Robot Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani

Swarm robotics draws inspiration from decentralized self-organizing biological systems in general and from the collective behavior of social insects in particular. In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher order group or team entities, ...

2009

Division of Labour in Self-Organised Groups

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani

In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher-order entities, such as groups and teams whose task solving capacities transcend those of the individual participants. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such higher-order entities u ...

Springer Verlag2008

Audio-visual detection of multiple chirping robots

Francesco Mondada, Alexey Gribovskiy

Design, study, and control of mixed animals-robots societies are the fields of scientific exploration that can bring new opportunities for study and control of groups of social insects and animals and, in particular, for improvement of welfare and breeding ...

IOS Press2008

Influence of the level of polyandry and genetic architecture on division of labour

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Genetic diversity is thought to be a main factor in determin ing task performance and behavioral plasticity of social insect colonies. This diversity has two main causes. a) Multiple matings by the colony queen (polyandry) and b) the number of regions on t ...

MIT press2006

Division of labour and colony efficiency in social insects: effects of interactions between genetic architecture, colony kin structure and rate of perturbations

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Stéphane Magnenat, Markus Waibel

The efficiency of social insect colonies critically depends on their ability to efficiently allocate workers to the various tasks which need to be performed. While numerous models have investigated the mechanisms allowing an efficient colony response to ex ...

2006