How does metabolism influence social behavior? This fundamental question at the interface of molecular biology and social evolution is hard to address with experiments in animals, and therefore, we turned to a simple microbial system: swarming in the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Using genetic engineering, we excised a locus encoding a key metabolic regulator and disrupted P. aeruginosa's m...

During a screening of a mini-Tn5-luxCDABE transposon mutant library of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 for alterations in swarming motility, 36 mutants were identified with Tn5 insertions in genes for the synthesis or function of flagellin and type IV pilus, in genes for the Xcp-related type II secretion system, and in regulatory, metabolic, chemosensory, and hypothetical genes with unknown functio...

In this paper, we propose a model to investigate the relative efficiency of simple swarming strategies based on the interplay between spontaneous and recruitment-based emigration. We conduct a dynamical study of the model which combines inverse density dependence, saturation effects and induced vs. diffusion-like population transfer. The influence of the most relevant parameters is explored on ...

Most multi-agent systems are inspired by classical AI, whose objective was to realize humanlevel intelligence in a computer. As the field has moved toward multiple agents, there has been a presumption that individual agents still aspire to high-level intelligence. Swarming systems follow an alternative model, inspired more by artificial life than artificial intelligence. The individual agents i...

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...

Collective motion of self-sustained swarming flows has recently provided examples of small-scale turbulence arising where viscous effects are dominant. We report the first observation of universal enstrophy cascade in concentrated swarming sperm consistent with a body of evidence built from various independent measurements. We found a well-defined k^{-3} power-law decay of a velocity field powe...

Currently, the Internet is experiencing the grid accelerated file transfer phenomenon (swarming). It has gained immense popularity and dominance through BitTorrent and has thus far accounted for a substantial amount of the total Internet traffic. In this paper, we borrow ideas liberally from the literature to argue that the use of swarming protocol for traffic/content delivery within the wirele...

We compared the abilities of media from agar plates surrounding swarming and nonswarming cells of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium to wet a nonpolar surface by measuring the contact angles of small drops. The swarming cells were wild type for chemotaxis, and the nonswarming cells were nonchemotactic mutants with motor biases that were counterclockwise (cheY) or clockwise (cheZ). The latt...

Swarming is a phenomenon where collective motion arises from simple local interactions between typically identical individuals. Here, we investigate the effects of variability in behavior among the agents in finite swarms with both alignment and cohesive interactions. We show that swarming is abolished above a critical fraction of non-aligners who do not participate in alignment. In certain reg...

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...