How complex collective behaviour emerges from simple interactions between individuals is a central question in behavioural biology.
From flocks of birds to schools of fish, ant colonies to termite societies, coordinated group behaviour often arises without any individual directing the group.
Yet observing how such patterns emerge in intact animal societies under controlled laboratory conditions remains a major experimental challenge.
A new paper co-authored by Dr H. Hugo, describes a new method to observe termite colonies as they spontaneously organise into coordinated trail networks. The final stages of this study were carried out here in Zoology. Dr Hugo is a former member of the LeBoeuf Lab here and a guest researcher of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour.
Instead of studying isolated individuals or groups confined in small arenas, the protocol keeps entire colonies connected to their original nests, allowing individual termites to move freely across a large experimental landscape with semi-folded geometry. With this method, rather than forcibly transferring individuals into the observation area through manual handling, the decision to leave the nest and enter the arena remains with the colony itself. This is important because working with intact colonies preserves the social context in which termites naturally interact. Combined with high-resolution video recording and automated movement tracking, the platform enables simultaneous observation of hundreds of thousands of moving termites, capturing how collective motion emerges from countless local interactions under controlled laboratory conditions.
Using the Neotropical termite Constrictotermes cyphergaster as a model species, the study found that coordinated trail networks emerged rapidly even in the absence of water and food sources. The extensive datasets generated with the method are now supporting follow-up analyses using computer vision techniques and statistical modelling to investigate further how organised collective behaviour emerges from local interactions at different scales.
This first paper, published in Movement Ecology as part of the special issue Collective Behaviour, provides the methodological foundation for a mechanistic approach to investigate how termite societies, and potentially other animal collectives, transition from individual interactions to group-level organisation.
Read the paper: Hugo, H., Couzin, I.D. Using semi-folded arenas to observe spontaneous emergence of collective trails in whole colonies of termites. Mov Ecol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-026-00674-6
Image: Section of a whole-colony trail network generated during a representative observation. Image credit: H. Hugo