Colony in sentence

303 examples of Colony in a sentence

It's been estimated in the U.S., in a tiny colony of big brown bats, that they will feed on over a million insects a year, and in the United States of America, right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome.

You'd like to see a colony on Mars.

He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab.

I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish.

Honeybees can be considered a super-organism, where the colony is the organism and it's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms.

For example, we study hygiene, where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest, from the colony, and it keeps the colony healthy.

It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony, and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity.

It could be that on one day, the colony is split between two boxes, but on another day, it could be together in a single box, or split between three or more boxes, and that all seems rather erratic, really.

So what we do is take all these data from all these different days and pool them together to extract a long-term association pattern by applying techniques with network analysis to get a complete picture of the social structure of the colony.

This bat colony is organized in two different communities which cannot be predicted from the daily fission-fusion dynamics.

Even more interesting, in fact: Every year, around October, the colony splits up, and all bats hibernate separately, but year after year, when the bats come together again in the spring, the communities stay the same.

To understand this system, we built a computer model of roosting, based on simple, individual rules, and simulated thousands and thousands of days in the virtual bat colony.

What the model told us is that, in a nutshell, each bat knows a few other colony members as her friends, and is just slightly more likely to roost in a box with them.

Between 2010 and 2011, the colony lost more than two thirds of its members, probably due to the very cold winter.

The next spring, it didn't form two communities like every year, which may have led the whole colony to die because it had become too small.

Instead, it formed a single, cohesive social unit, which allowed the colony to survive that season and thrive again in the next two years.

What we know is that the bats are not aware that their colony is doing this.

All they do is follow simple association rules, and from this simplicity emerges social complexity which allows the colony to be resilient against dramatic changes in the population structure.

So in an ant colony, there's no one in charge, and all systems like this without central control are regulated using very simple interactions.

So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to forage.

But the colony gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they eat.

This makes sense for the ant colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more foragers they send out.

And what we're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage, because a colony like that would forage less.

This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years, which is about as long as a colony lives.

Each symbol is a colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had, because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony.

And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years, is a great-grandmother.

Here's her daughter colony, here's her granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter colonies.

And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the parent colony.

So all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact, colony 154 is a huge success.

The growing colony of bacteria that you see here is about the width of a human hair.

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