Affiliation:
1. Department of Biological Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
Abstract
During their lifetime, superorganisms, like unitary organisms, undergo transformations that change the machinery of their collective behaviour. Here, we suggest that these transformations are largely understudied and propose that more systematic research into the ontogeny of collective behaviours is needed if we hope to better understand the link between proximate behavioural mechanisms and the development of collective adaptive functions. In particular, certain social insects engage in self-assemblage, forming dynamic and physically connected architectures with striking similarities to developing multicellular organisms, making them good model systems for ontogenetic studies of collective behaviour. However, exhaustive time series and three-dimensional data are required to thoroughly characterize the different life stages of the collective structures and the transitions between these stages. The well-established fields of embryology and developmental biology offer practical tools and theoretical frameworks that could speed up the acquisition of new knowledge about the formation, development, maturity and dissolution of social insect self-assemblages and, by extension, other superorganismal behaviours. We hope that this review will encourage an expansion of the ontogenetic perspective in the field of collective behaviour and, in particular, in self-assemblage research, which has far-reaching applications in robotics, computer science and regenerative medicine.
This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Collective behaviour through time’.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Reference224 articles.
1. On aims and methods of Ethology
2. Huxley JS. 1942 Evolution: the modern synthesis. London, UK: Allen & Unwin.
3. ONTOGENY OF BEHAVIOUR
4. The biological principles of swarm intelligence
5. Hölldobler B, Wilson EO. 2008 The superorganism: the beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies, 1st edn. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Cited by
4 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献