Emergent periodicity in the collective synchronous flashing of fireflies
- University of Colorado Boulder, United States
- Purdue University West Lafayette, United States
- University of New Mexico, United States
Abstract
In isolation from their peers, Photinus carolinus fireflies flash with no intrinsic period between successive bursts. Yet, when congregating into large mating swarms, these fireflies transition into predictability, synchronizing with their neighbors with a rhythmic periodicity. Here we propose a mechanism for emergence of synchrony and periodicity, and formulate the principle in a mathematical framework. Remarkably, with no fitting parameters, analytic predictions from this simple principle and framework agree strikingly well with data. Next, we add further sophistication to the framework using a computational approach featuring groups of random oscillators via integrate-and-fire interactions controlled by a tunable parameter. This agent-based framework of P. carolinus fireflies interacting in swarms of increasing density also shows quantitatively similar phenomenology and reduces to the analytic framework in the appropriate limit of the tunable coupling strength. We discuss our findings and note that the resulting dynamics follow the style of a decentralized follow-the-leader synchronization, where any of the randomly flashing individuals may take the role of the leader of any subsequent synchronized flash burst.
Data availability
Data Availability: The data and code that support the findings of this study are openly available in the EmergentPeriodicity GitHub repository found at https://github.com/peleg-lab/EmergentPeriodicity
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Ross-Lynn Fellowship
- Kunaal Joshi
- Srividya Iyer-Biswas
Showwalter Trust
- Kunaal Joshi
- Srividya Iyer-Biswas
Purdue Research Foundation
- Kunaal Joshi
- Srividya Iyer-Biswas
Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement
- Orit Peleg
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Sarfati et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Emergent periodicity in the collective synchronous flashing of fireflies
eLife 12:e78908.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78908
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
- Physics of Living Systems
Recent experimental studies showed that electrically coupled neural networks like in mammalian inferior olive nucleus generate synchronized rhythmic activity by the subthreshold sinusoidal-like oscillations of the membrane voltage. Understanding the basic mechanism and its implication of such phenomena in the nervous system bears fundamental importance and requires preemptively the connectome information of a given nervous system. Inspired by these necessities of developing a theoretical and computational model to this end and, however, in the absence of connectome information for the inferior olive nucleus, here we investigated interference phenomena of the subthreshold oscillations in the reference system Caenorhabditis elegans for which the structural anatomical connectome was completely known recently. We evaluated how strongly the sinusoidal wave was transmitted between arbitrary two cells in the model network. The region of cell-pairs that are good at transmitting waves changed according to the wavenumber of the wave, for which we named a wavenumber-dependent transmission map. Also, we unraveled that (1) the transmission of all cell-pairs disappeared beyond a threshold wavenumber, (2) long distance and regular patterned transmission existed in the body-wall muscles part of the model network, and (3) major hub cell-pairs of the transmission were identified for many wavenumber conditions. A theoretical and computational model presented in this study provided fundamental insight for understanding how the multi-path constructive/destructive interference of the subthreshold oscillations propagating on electrically coupled neural networks could generate wavenumber-dependent synchronized rhythmic activity.
