ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Social behaviour and collective motion in plant-animal worms.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantifying Information Exchange Between Cells in Inflammaging.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Form and function in biological filaments: a physicist's review.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Review
- Multi-Agent Hierarchical Graph Attention Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The Acoel nervous system: morphology and development.Neural development · 2024Review
- Topological transition in filamentous cyanobacteria: from motion to structure.Communications physics · 2024Article
- Ultrafast reversible self-assembly of living tangled matter.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Automatic mapping of multiplexed social receptive fields by deep learning and GPU-accelerated 3D videography.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Swirlonic state of active matter.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Social flocculation in plant-animal worms.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Plant-animal worms round themselves up in circular mills on the beach.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Understanding how animal groups achieve coordinated movement.The Journal of experimental biology · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social behaviour may enable organisms to occupy ecological niches that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Here, we test this major evolutionary principle by demonstrating self-organizing social behaviour in the plant-animal, Symsagittifera roscoffensis. These marine aceol flat worms rely for all of their nutrition on the algae within their bodies: hence their common name. We show that individual worms interact with one another to coordinate their movements so that even at low densities they begin to swim in small polarized groups and at increasing densities such flotillas turn into circular mills. We use computer simulations to: (i) determine if real worms interact socially by comparing them with virtual worms that do not interact and (ii) show that the social phase transitions of the real worms can occur based only on local interactions between and among them. We hypothesize that such social behaviour helps the worms to form the dense biofilms or mats observed on certain sun-exposed sandy beaches in the upper intertidal of the East Atlantic and to become in effect a super-organismic seaweed in a habitat where macro-algal seaweeds cannot anchor themselves. Symsagittifera roscoffensis, a model organism in many other areas in biology (including stem cell regeneration), also seems to be an ideal model for understanding how individual behaviours can lead, through collective movement, to social assemblages.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.