If this oscillates, they alternate their position in the center of the group, warmer, and the extremes, colder. Now, a team of psychologists and robotics experts at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom suggest that when grouped together, rodents function as a superorganism, a single animal capable of changing shape to regulate its temperature.
To determine this, these experts have developed a computer model that measures its fluctuations from the movements of rodents. Thus, they have been able to find out that the way each individual acts improves the ability of all of them to normalize their body temperature, and makes it much closer to that appropriate for a rodent.
In a study published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology , Jonathan Glancy, from the Department of Psychology of the aforementioned institution, who has coordinated the trial, points out that “our model describes how the group appears as a system that organizes itself and reveals how complex group behaviors that emanate from simple interactions between individuals can be ”.
