Levels of Biological Organisation: L4 Macroscopic populations
Collectives of organisms, such as bees and fish, that process environmental information to facilitate predator avoidance, temperature regulation or other functions.
Related Research Projects
Research Project: Bottom-up modelling of dense bacterial suspensions
Dense active suspensions, such as those formed by swarming bacteria, constitute a type of active matter that is particularly hard to model.
Research Project: Collective tug-of-war dynamics: from molecular motors to ant groups
The emergence of directed transport as a collective behaviour of many microscopic constituents is a ubiquitous problem in the statistical physics of active particles.
Research Project: Microscopically-informed active field theories
Active field theories are widely used to study collective effects in driven systems at all levels of organisation, allowing instabilities to pattern formation to be identified.