ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2018
How do fire ants control the rheology of their aggregations? A statistical mechanics approach.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Catch bond kinetics are instrumental to cohesion of fire ant rafts under load.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Ant waves-Spontaneous activity waves in fire-ant columns.Science advances · 2023Article
- Social interactions lead to motility-induced phase separation in fire ants.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Computational exploration of treadmilling and protrusion growth observed in fire ant rafts.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Nonsteady fracture of transient networks: The case of vitrimer.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Treadmilling and dynamic protrusions in fire ant rafts.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Collective dynamics in entangled worm and robot blobs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- A Statistical Model of Expansive Growth in Plant and Fungal Cells: The Case of Phycomyces.Biophysical journal · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Active networks are omnipresent in nature, from the molecular to the macro-scale. In this study, we explore the mechanical behaviour of fire ant aggregations, closely knit swarms that display impressive dynamics culminating with the aggregations' capacity to self-heal and adapt to the environment. Although the combined elasticity and rheology of the ant aggregation can be characterized by phenomenological mechanical models (e.g. linear Maxwell or Kelvin-Voigt model), it is not clear how the behaviour of individual ants affects the aggregations' emerging responses. Here, we explore an alternative way to think about these materials, describing them as a collection of individuals connected via elastic chains that associate and dissociate over time. Using our knowledge of these connections-e.g. their elasticity and attachment/dissociation rates-we construct a statistical description of connection stretch and derive an evolution equation for the corresponding stretch distribution. This time-evolving stretch distribution is then used to determine important macroscopic measures, e.g. stress, energy storage and energy dissipation, in the network. In this context, we show how the physical characteristics and activities of individual ants can explain the elasticity, flow and shear thinning of the aggregation. In particular, we find that experimental results are matched if the detachment rate between two individuals increases with tension in the connection.
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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.