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Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment
Worms often aggregate through physical connections and exhibit remarkable functions such as efficient migration, survival under environmental changes, and defense against predators. In particular, entangled blobs demonstrate versatile behaviors for their survival; they form spherical blobs and migra...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10495593/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37706011 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1207374 |
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author | Mikami, Taishi Wakita, Daiki Kobayashi, Ryo Ishiguro, Akio Kano, Takeshi |
author_facet | Mikami, Taishi Wakita, Daiki Kobayashi, Ryo Ishiguro, Akio Kano, Takeshi |
author_sort | Mikami, Taishi |
collection | PubMed |
description | Worms often aggregate through physical connections and exhibit remarkable functions such as efficient migration, survival under environmental changes, and defense against predators. In particular, entangled blobs demonstrate versatile behaviors for their survival; they form spherical blobs and migrate collectively by flexibly changing their shape in response to the environment. In contrast to previous studies on the collective behavior of worm blobs that focused on locomotion in a flat environment, we investigated the mechanisms underlying their adaptive motion in confined environments, focusing on tubificine worm collectives. We first performed several behavioral experiments to observe the aggregation process, collective response to aversive stimuli, the motion of a few worms, and blob motion in confined spaces with and without pegs. We found the blob deformed and passed through a narrow passage using environmental heterogeneities. Based on these behavioral findings, we constructed a simple two-dimensional agent-based model wherein the flexible body of a worm was described as a cross-shaped agent that could deform, rotate, and translate. The simulations demonstrated that the behavioral findings were well-reproduced. Our findings aid in understanding how physical interactions contribute to generating adaptive collective behaviors in real-world environments as well as in designing novel swarm robotic systems consisting of soft agents. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10495593 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-104955932023-09-13 Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment Mikami, Taishi Wakita, Daiki Kobayashi, Ryo Ishiguro, Akio Kano, Takeshi Front Neurorobot Neuroscience Worms often aggregate through physical connections and exhibit remarkable functions such as efficient migration, survival under environmental changes, and defense against predators. In particular, entangled blobs demonstrate versatile behaviors for their survival; they form spherical blobs and migrate collectively by flexibly changing their shape in response to the environment. In contrast to previous studies on the collective behavior of worm blobs that focused on locomotion in a flat environment, we investigated the mechanisms underlying their adaptive motion in confined environments, focusing on tubificine worm collectives. We first performed several behavioral experiments to observe the aggregation process, collective response to aversive stimuli, the motion of a few worms, and blob motion in confined spaces with and without pegs. We found the blob deformed and passed through a narrow passage using environmental heterogeneities. Based on these behavioral findings, we constructed a simple two-dimensional agent-based model wherein the flexible body of a worm was described as a cross-shaped agent that could deform, rotate, and translate. The simulations demonstrated that the behavioral findings were well-reproduced. Our findings aid in understanding how physical interactions contribute to generating adaptive collective behaviors in real-world environments as well as in designing novel swarm robotic systems consisting of soft agents. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-08-29 /pmc/articles/PMC10495593/ /pubmed/37706011 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1207374 Text en Copyright © 2023 Mikami, Wakita, Kobayashi, Ishiguro and Kano. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Mikami, Taishi Wakita, Daiki Kobayashi, Ryo Ishiguro, Akio Kano, Takeshi Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
title | Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
title_full | Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
title_fullStr | Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
title_full_unstemmed | Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
title_short | Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
title_sort | elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10495593/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37706011 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1207374 |
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