As the number or density of interacting individuals in a social group increases, a transition can develop from uncorrelated and disordered behavior of the individuals to a collective coherent pattern. We expand this observation by exploring the fine details of termite movement patterns to demonstrate that the value of the scaling exponent μ of a power law describing the Lévy walk of an individual is modified collectively as the density of animals in the group changes. This effect is absent when termites interact with inert obstacles. We also show that the network of encounters and interactions among specific individuals is selective, resembling a preferential attachment mechanism that is important for social networking. Our data strongly suggest that preferential attachments, a phenomenon not reported previously, and favorite interactions with a limited number of acquaintances are responsible for the generation of Lévy movement patterns in these social insects.

随着社会群体中互动个体的数量或密度的增加，可以从个体的不相关和无序行为转变为集体一致模式。我们通过探索白蚁运动模式的细节来扩展这一观察结果，以证明描述个体 Lévy 行走的幂律的缩放指数 μ 的值随着群体中动物密度的变化而集体修改。当白蚁与惰性障碍物相互作用时，这种效果就不存在了。我们还表明，特定个体之间的相遇和互动网络是有选择性的，类似于对社交网络很重要的优先依恋机制。我们的数据强烈表明优先附件，一种以前没有报道过的现象，