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Contact
telephone number (Australia) +61(0)401 325 405 (mobile)
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Current position I m currently working on experimental and theoretical studies of collective motion in animal groups such as locusts, bees and ants, as a Postdoctoral fellow in the Steve Simpson's research group and with Madeleine Beekman at the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Sydney. Where to find me: School of Biological Sciences
My research interest •Very often in Nature, things happening at some "macroscopic" level, say a group of animals or some tissue, are poorly understood and seem hardly predictable when they result from a multitude of interaction at a lower "microscopic" level, say a massive number of individual animals or cells. Linking these two levels, or more generally, bridging the gaps between scales is a topic that never ceases to fascinate me. To achieve this goal, I use methods originated from the framework of self-organization and non-linear systems, where models are used to predict how local rules at the microscopic level result in patterns observed at the macroscopic level. Models are built from the experimental quantification of behaviour and interactions at the individual or microscopic level - that is, the rules used in the model correspond, as much as possible, to mechanisms observed and measured empirically - I tend to think that it's the only way to make models really useful for the experimenter, abstract rules and parameters that can't be translated into some biological mechanisms are most of time leading to dead-ends. When we have our model, then its predictions about the collective pattern, or macroscopic level, are confronted to experimental results. Such cycles involving both experiments and models have been successfully applied to social insect collective behaviour such as foraging and trail formation, nest construction, division of labour etc... They are increasingly used to study other animal collective behaviour such as fish schools, bird flocks, or locust marching bands and swarms (my current favourite model system), but have been and will more and more be used to study organization of large groups of microscopic organisms or cells. Why is that so important? It's a key to understand how animal societies work, which is fascinating enough by itself in my opinion, but it's also opening new perspectives in understanding the evolution of sociality, and even more broadly, understanding how things organize at a level from the complex interactions happening at a lower level is probably holding many exciting new insights about evolution of life in general. The topics I'm more precisely currently studying are the following • Collective patterns and the way animals that have only a limited perception can achieve large scale structures such as nests or networks spanning over their territory. This includes most of my PhD work on ant tunneling networks as well as human street networks. I also recenttly started to work on wood ants trail networks. • Collective movements in animal groups and the way this is scaling up from interactions among individual to migrations over large scales. My current work is focused on how, where and when locusts massive marching bands form and lead to outbreaks. • and much more... The page is still under construction Previous employement /education • 2004: PhD - Doctorat de l'Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. Étude expérimentale et modélisation de la morphogenèse des réseaux de galeries chez la fourmi Messor sancta. •2005: Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Oxford (with Steve Simpson, Iain Couzin and David Sumpter).
See also: Steve
Simpson The
Unit of Social Ecology in Brussels The Australian Plague
Locust Commission
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Publications Buhl J., Gautrais J., Deneubourg, J.L., Kuntz P., Theraulaz. (2006) The growth and form of tunnelling networks in ants. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 243, 287-298. PDF
Buhl, J.,
Sumpter, D.J., Couzin, I.D., Hale, J., Despland, E, Miller, E &
Simpson, S.J. (2006) From disorder to order
in marching locusts. Science,
312, 1402. Buhl J., Gautrais J., Reeves N., Solé R.V., Valverde S., Kuntz P., Theraulaz G. (2006) Topological patterns in street networks of self-organized urban settlements. European Physical Journal B, 49, 513-522.PDF Buhl J., Deneubourg J.L., Grimal A. and Theraulaz G. (2005) Self-organized digging activity in ant colonies. Behavioral Sociobiology and Ecology. 58, 9-17.ARTICLE Buhl J., Gautrais J., Solé R.V., Kuntz P., Valverde S., Deneubourg J.L., Theraulaz G. (2004) Efficiency and robustness in ant networks of galleries. European Physical Journal B, 42, 123-129.PDF Buhl J., Gautrais J., Deneubourg J.L. and Theraulaz G. (2004) Nest excavation in ants: group size effects on the size and structure of tunneling networks. Naturwissenschaften, 92:602-606 Buhl J., Deneubourg J.L., Theraulaz G. (2002) Self-Organized Networks of Galleries in the Ant Messor Sancta, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2463:163-175
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