Complex decision making in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum I
am interested in the decision making capabilities of slime
moulds. Slime moulds, which are unicellular, lack brains. Nevertheless,
we have recently shown that these simple organisms are capable of
flexible and complex behaviours.
For more information, please see:Latty, T. & Beekman, M. 2010 Speed–accuracy trade-offs during foraging decisions in the acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Latty, T. & Beekman, M. 2010 Irrational decision-making in an amoeboid organism: transitivity and context-dependent preferences. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Dussutour,A, Latty,TM,
Beekman,M and Simpson SJ. Amoeboid organism solves complex nutritional
challenges. In press, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Latty,TM and Beekman, M (2009). Food quality affects search strategy in the acellular slime mould, Physarum polycephalum. Behavioural Ecology 20: 1160 - 1167 :
Latty, TM and
Beekman, M (2009). Food quality, hunger and the risk of light exposure
effect patch choice decisions in the acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum Ecology 91:22-27 | Dynamic Optimisation in Self-organised Biological Systems
The
goal of this project is to understand how self-organized natural
systems are able to solve problems. For example, bee colonies are able
to change the number of workers they allocate to food sources depending
on the food sources quality. Amazingly, they do this without designated
leaders. Social insect colonies are perfect examples of decentralized
decision making. We aim to examine the mechanisms that allow these
types of decisions to be made in three different decentralized systems:
ants, bees and slime moulds. This is part of an international
collaboration between the labs of Dr. Madeleine Beekman, Dr. Martin
Middendorf, Dr. David Sumpter and Dr. Toshi Nakagaki.
| Self-organised transportation networks in ants
I am interested in the structure, function
and development of ant transportation networks. Human engineers and
urban planners face the task of designing efficient and cost effective
networks. Since building longer roads/tracks requires more
resources (and is therefore more costly), a challenge for engineers is to
design transportation networks that minimise resource use while still
maintaining connectivity between cities, stations etc. Similar problems are faced
by ant colonies which build trail networks to connect multiple nests to many
food sources. How do ants 'design' transportation networks in the absence of
centralised control? What, if anything, do ants optimise when building networks? This work has been done in close collaboration with computer scientist Kai Ramsch at the University of Leipzig. For more information, please see Latty, T.,
Ramsch, K., Ito, K., Nakagaki, T., Sumpter, D. J. T., Middendorf, M.
& Beekman, M. Structure and formation of ant transportation
networks. Journal of The Royal Society Interface.
Picture of ant network between three nests. The inset shows the shortest possible network (Steiner tree). Way to go ants!
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