Berlin 2024 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 35: Active Matter V (joint session BP/DY)
BP 35.4: Talk
Friday, March 22, 2024, 10:15–10:30, H 1028
Size-coordination trade-off in Trichoplax adhaerens, an animal lacking a central nervous system — Mircea R. Davidescu1, •Pawel Romanczuk2,3, Thomas Gregor4, and Iain D. Couzin5,6,7 — 1Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, USA — 2Dept. of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany — 3Excellence cluster "Science of Intelligence", Berlin, Germany — 4Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics, Princeton University, USA — 5Dept. of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany — 6Dept. of Biology, Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Germany — 7Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior, University of Konstanz, Germany
Coordination with increasing size is a fundamental challenge affecting collective systems from biofilms to governments. The earliest multicellular organisms were decentralized, with indeterminate sizes and morphologies, as exemplified by Trichoplax adhaerens, arguably the earliest-diverged and simplest motile animal. We investigated the coordination in T. adhaerens by observing the degree of collective order in locomotion across animals of differing sizes and found that larger individuals exhibit increasingly disordered locomotion. We reproduced this effect using an active elastic cellular sheets model and show that this relationship is best recapitulated across all body sizes when the simulation parameters are tuned to criticality. We discuss possible implications of this on the evolution hierarchical structures such as nervous systems in larger organisms.
Keywords: criticality; phase transition; active matter; collective motion