Response thresholds alone cannot explain empirical patterns of division of labor in social insects.

The effects of heterogeneity in group composition remain a major hurdle to our understanding of collective behavior across disciplines. In social insects, division of labor (DOL) is an emergent, colony-level trait thought to depend on colony composition. Theoretically, behavioral response threshold models have most commonly been employed to investigate the impact of heterogeneity on DOL.

anTraX, a software package for high-throughput video tracking of color-tagged insects.

Recent years have seen a surge in methods to track and analyze animal behavior. Nevertheless, tracking individuals in closely interacting, group-living organisms remains a challenge. Here, we present anTraX, an algorithm and software package for high-throughput video tracking of color-tagged insects.

orco Mutagenesis Causes Loss of Antennal Lobe Glomeruli and Impaired Social Behavior in Ants.

Life inside ant colonies is orchestrated with diverse pheromones, but it is not clear how ants perceive these social signals. It has been proposed that pheromone perception in ants evolved via expansions in the numbers of odorant receptors (ORs) and antennal lobe glomeruli. Here, we generate the first mutant lines in the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, by disrupting orco, a gene required for the function of all ORs.

Animal behavior: The Truman Show for ants.

A new tracking setup allows researchers to monitor the behavior of individual ants inside a colony. The first results demonstrate a link between age, spatial organization and division of labor, and quantify the dynamics of the colony's social network.

Modeling E. coli tumbles by rotational diffusion. Implications for chemotaxis.

The bacterium Escherichia coli in suspension in a liquid medium swims by a succession of runs and tumbles, effectively describing a random walk. The tumbles randomize incompletely, i.e.

Mathematical description of bacterial traveling pulses.

The Keller-Segel system has been widely proposed as a model for bacterial waves driven by chemotactic processes. Current experiments on Escherichia coli have shown the precise structure of traveling pulses. We present here an alternative mathematical description of traveling pulses at the macroscopic scale.