A model of the burglar alarm hypothesis of prey alarm calls.

When approached by a predator many prey species will emit an "alarm call" as a form of anti-predator behavior. One hypothesis for the function of alarm calls is the "burglar alarm" hypothesis whereby upon attack, a prey renders itself dangerous to a predator by generating an alarm call that attracts a predator at higher trophic levels in the food chain; that is, attracts a predator to the prey's own predator. This paper concerns a model incorporating a mechanism to test the burglar alarm hypothesis.

Circumvention of Learning Increases Intoxication Efficacy of Nematicidal Engineered Bacteria.

Synthetic biology holds promise to engineer systems to treat diseases. One critical, yet underexplored, facet of designing such systems is the interplay between the system and the pathogen. Understanding this interplay may be critical to increasing efficacy and overcoming resistance against the system.

On the formation of persistent states in neuronal network models of feature selectivity.

We study the existence and stability of localized activity states in neuronal network models of feature selectivity with either a ring or spherical topology. We find that the neural field has mono-stable, bi-stable, and tri-stable regimes depending on the parameters of the weighting function. In the case of homogeneous inputs, these localized activity states are marginally stable with respect to rotations.