organize an economy
1. Wings combine support and material economy: winged insects
"Insect wings provide yet another example of braced, flat surfaces--cylindrical cantilever beams (veins) support a thin membrane. A pound of fruit-fly wings laid end to end would stretch about 500 miles, a very low mass per unit length--a steel wi...
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2. Individual actions benefit group: white-fronted bee-eater
"Helena Cronin, codirector of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, has a new approach to Darwinism: Only the altruistic survive. Smart evolution, Cronin says, involves self-sacrifice to aid the...
3. Sensory bristles organize with minimum communication: fruit flies
"Computational and mathematical methods are extensively used to analyze and model biological systems…We provide an example of the reverse of this strategy, in which a biological process is used to derive a solution to a long-standing comput...
4. Swarms act as intelligent organizations: ants and bees
"In essence, we believe that social insects have been so successful--they are almost everywhere in the ecosphere--because of three characteristics: flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment); robustness (even when one or ...
5. Plants minimize water loss: desert
"The vegetation of arid ecosystems displays scale-free, self-organized spatial patterns. Monitoring of such patterns could provide warning signals of the occurrence of sudden shifts towards desert conditions…Scanlon et al. 4 (page 209) and ...
6. Polykrikos dinoflagellates organize cells in a pseudocolony.
“The pseudocolonial cell organization of Polykrikos species is among the most novel features of these dinoflagellates. A similar cellular organization has also been described for parasitic dinoflagellates, such as Haplozoon.” (Hoppenrath and L...
7. Protein helps organize cuticle: red flour beetle
"During each molting cycle of insect development, synthesis of new cuticle occurs concurrently with the partial degradation of the overlying old exoskeleton. Protection of the newly synthesized cuticle from molting fluid enzymes has long been attr...
8. Marking unrewarding routes: pharaoh ant
"Forager ants lay attractive trail pheromones to guide nestmates to food1, 2 but the effectiveness of foraging networks might be improved if pheromones could also be used to repel foragers from unrewarding routes3, 4. Here we present empirical evi...
9. Collaborating for group decisions: honeybees
"Researchers at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by principal researcher Feniosky Pena-Mora, are looking at ways to improve human collaboration during disaster relief efforts. They are attempting to draw inspiration from the collabor...
10. Groups move efficiently: army ants
"By forming three lanes of traffic during hunting expeditions, army ants in Panama come close to achieving the maximum possible rate of traffic flow. Given that army ants are blind, and that a hunting party might consist of 200,000 ants marching i...
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