Noise-mediated emergent phenomena in worms and plants

Throughout nature, interactions between individuals in a collective system give rise to emergent phenomena across scales in both space and time: motile systems like insect swarms and bird flocks often operate at much more rapid timescales than sessile systems like slowly growing plants. In this talk, I will discuss how fluctuations and symmetry breaking mediate self-organization and emergent collective behavior in models of (motile) entangled worm blobs and (sessile) mutually-shading sunflowers. Following experiments that reveal emergent locomotion in dense blobs of aquatic worms, I show how symmetry breaking and positive feedback in an active polymer model of worm behavior enable the blob to cohesively traverse a temperature gradient [1]. Next, I describe how information can propagate through an interacting system of plants, and demonstrate how self-organization emerges in the presence of random fluctuations [2]. By leveraging variability and disorder, collective living systems can adapt to perturbations and achieve emergent functionalities to enhance their survival.

[1] Chantal Nguyen, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, Harry Tuazon, Daniel I. Goldman, M. Saad Bhamla, and Orit Peleg. Front. Phys. 9:734499 (2021)

[2] Chantal Nguyen, Imri Dromi, Aharon Kempinski, Gabriella E. C. Gall, Orit Peleg, and Yasmine Meroz. arXiv:2206.05540 (2022)