Emergent dynamical phases and collective motion in termites.

Abstract

Termites which are able to forage in the open can be often seen, in the field or in the laboratory: (i) wandering around, forming no observable pattern, (ii) clustering themselves in a dense and almost immobile pack, or (iii) milling about in a circular movement. Despite being well reported patterns, they are normally regarded as independent phenomena whose specific traits have never been properly quantified. Evidence, however, favours the hypothesis that these are interdependent patterns, arising from self-organized interactions and movement among workers. After all, termites are a form of active matter where blind cooperative individuals are self-propelled and lack the possibility of visual cues to spatially orientate and align. It follows that their non-trivial close-contact patterns could generate motion-collision-induced phase separations. This would then trigger the emergence of these three patterns (disorder, clustering, milling) as parts of the same continuum. By inspecting termite groups confined in arenas, we could quantitatively describe each one of these patterns in detail. We identified disorder, clustering and milling spatial patterns. These phases and their transitions are characterized aiming to offer refinements in the understanding of these aspects of self-propelled particles in active matter where close-range contacts and collisions are important.