The ability to move over and colonize surface substrata has been linked to the formation of biofilms and to the virulence of some bacterial pathogens. Results from this study show that the gastrointestinal pathogen Yersinia enterocolitica can migrate over and colonize surfaces by swarming motility, a form of cooperative multicellular behavior. Immunoblot analysis and electron microscopy indicat...

Burkholderia glumae is a plant pathogenic bacterium that uses an acyl-homoserine lactone-mediated quorum sensing system to regulate protein secretion, oxalate production and major virulence determinants such as toxoflavin and flagella. B. glumae also releases surface-active rhamnolipids. In Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkholderia thailandensis, rhamnolipids, along with flagella, are required fo...

Male Psorophora columbiae were shown to respond to sound during swarming. The responses consisted of abrupt changes in flight speed and direction. Tones with frequencies of 200 to 425 Hz were attractive to males over a distance of at least 1 m. Male mosquitoes responded better to tones with sine waveforms than they did either to square waveforms or triangular waveforms. Swarming males became ac...

Experiments have shown that wild type P. aeruginosa swarms much faster than rhlAB mutants on 0.4% agar concentration surface. These observations imply that development of a liquid thin film is an important component of the self-organized swarming process. A multiscale model is presented in this paper for studying interplay of key hydrodynamical and biological mechanisms involved in the swarming...

Collective navigation and swarming have been studied in animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, bacteria, and slime molds. Computer modeling has shown that collective behavior of simple agents can result from simple interactions between the agents, which include short range repulsion, intermediate range alignment, and long range attraction. Here we study collective navigation of bacte...

Using many inexpensive rovers in place of single costly ones is an idea that has been gaining attention in the last decade. How to effectively control those rovers is an open question, but swarming is an attractive option to present. While much research in the field investigates intelligent swarming, recent research has shown that the unintelligent swarm is an effective control mechanism for th...

Using many inexpensive rovers in place of single costly ones is an idea that has been gaining attention in the last decade. While much research in the field addresses intelligent swarming, in this paper, we look at unintelligent swarming as a control mechanism for an exploratory system. The two main issues that determine its effectiveness are how thoroughly a space is covered, and whether or no...

Honeybees swarm when they move to a new site for their hive. During the process of swarming, their behavior can be analyzed by classifying them as informed bees or uninformed bees, where the informed bees have some information about the destination while the uninformed bees follow the informed bees. The swarm’s movement can be viewed as a network of mobile nodes with asymmetric information exch...