The Silica's Walking Gait

The scientists knew that the silia must be engaging in some kind of long distance communication, but they didn't know how. Jan says, while some single celled organisms have been known to use cilia to crawl, this kind of co ordination had never been observed at this scale. In their models, the walking activity emerged naturally from interplay between the internal driving forces of the silia and the energy of their adhesion to the surface. The right balance between those two perimeters resulted in regular locomotion with each silium sticking and then lifting away like a leg.