Worley Alan, Sendova-Franks Ana B, Franks Nigel R
School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, 24 Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TQ, UK.
Department of Engineering Design and Mathematics, UWE Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2019 Mar 20;6(3):181626. doi: 10.1098/rsos.181626. eCollection 2019 Mar.
Individual animals can often move more safely or more efficiently as members of a group. This can be as simple as safety in numbers or as sophisticated as aerodynamic or hydrodynamic cooperation. Here, we show that individual plant-animal worms () can move to safety more quickly through flocculation. Flocs form in response to turbulence that might otherwise carry these beach-dwelling worms out to sea. They allow the worms to descend much more quickly to the safety of the substrate than single worms could swim. Descent speed increases with floc size such that larger flocs can catch up with smaller ones and engulf them to become even larger and faster. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of social flocculation in a wild, multicellular organism. It is also remarkable that such effective flocculation occurs where the components are comparatively large multicellular organisms organized as entangled ensembles.
作为群体的一员，个体动物通常能够更安全或更高效地移动。这可能像人多势众带来的安全那么简单，也可能像空气动力学或流体动力学合作那样复杂。在这里，我们表明，个体的动植物蠕虫（）可以通过絮凝更快地移动到安全地带。絮凝物是由湍流形成的，否则这些栖息在海滩的蠕虫可能会被冲到海里。它们使蠕虫能够比单个蠕虫游泳更快地下降到基质的安全地带。下降速度随着絮凝物大小的增加而增加，这样较大的絮凝物可以赶上较小的絮凝物并将它们吞没，从而变得更大、更快。据我们所知，这是首次在野生多细胞生物中证明社会絮凝现象。同样值得注意的是，这种有效的絮凝现象发生在组成部分是相对较大的多细胞生物且组织成纠缠在一起的集合体的地方。
