Sexes, species and cooperative interactions: mixed aggregation in social arthropods
Hovedinnhold
Speaker: Stamatios C. Nicolis, Unit of Biological and Artificial Self-organized Systems (BASS), Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Title: Sexes, species and cooperative interactions: mixed aggregation in social arthropods.
Abstract:
One of the most common manifestations of collective behaviour in animal kingdom, occurring in a wide range of taxa from bacteria and arthropods to mammals, is aggregation. Typically, aggregation occurs in response to environmental heterogeneities and/or to inter-individual attraction and takes place in patchy environments where animals tend to gather on food resources or shelters during resting periods. Here, I will present instances where aggregation occurs between individuals of different sexes and of different species in social arthropods like cockroaches and terrestrial isopods. Based on experiments and mathematical modelling, I will show the mechanisms responsible for aggregation and show how the presence of mixed groups (be they at the sex or species levels) generates unexpected new patterns.