Just came across this nice study by Davidescu et al.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2206163120
Larger bodies in the placozoan Trichoplax show less coordination across cells.
"We quantify the trade-off between increasing size and coordination in a multicellular animal with a decentralized anatomy that shows evidence of criticality and hypothesize as to the implications of this on the evolution hierarchical structures such as nervous systems in larger organisms."
Multicellular #organisms without a nervous system behave like a #swarm, finds study.
#signalling #animals #placozoan #Trichoplax
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-multicellular-nervous-swarm.html
Coordination between individuals is a fundamental challenge in collectives, and this is just as true for a country's government as it is for simple multicellular organisms. How does a group of many cells coordinate itself into a body that performs coherent behavior? In more evolved animal groups, that's the nervous system's job.
Gaspar Jekely
Scientific Frontline
CellBioNews