ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Scale-free movement patterns in termites emerge from social interactions and preferential attachments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Physical crowding truncates intrinsic Lévy-like motility into caste-specific movement regimes in social termites.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Article
- Nesting strategy reflects individual worker movement in termites.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Random Search Walks Inside Absorbing Annuli.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Emergent dynamical phases and collective motion in termites.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Information structure of heterogeneous criticality in a fish school.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Modeling the movement of Oecophylla smargandina on short-length scales in an unfamiliar environment.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Functional duality in group criticality via ambiguous interactions.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Foraging behaviour and patch size distribution jointly determine population dynamics in fragmented landscapes.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As the number or density of interacting individuals in a social group increases, a transition can develop from uncorrelated and disordered behavior of the individuals to a collective coherent pattern. We expand this observation by exploring the fine details of termite movement patterns to demonstrate that the value of the scaling exponent μ of a power law describing the Lévy walk of an individual is modified collectively as the density of animals in the group changes. This effect is absent when termites interact with inert obstacles. We also show that the network of encounters and interactions among specific individuals is selective, resembling a preferential attachment mechanism that is important for social networking. Our data strongly suggest that preferential attachments, a phenomenon not reported previously, and favorite interactions with a limited number of acquaintances are responsible for the generation of Lévy movement patterns in these social insects.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.