Title: Characterizing adaptive motility across scales and species

Abstract: Motile organisms have developed strategies to move through natural environments, which are often variable in both time and space. I will discuss two (quite different!) adaptive locomotive modes that are able to contend with the heterogeneity and uncertainty of such environments. (1) Bacteria have evolved mechanisms to facilitate motility through a wide range of complex settings. We explore how bacterial motility patterns adapt to confined, disordered environments. We discuss the features of these results that generalize across bacterial species (and those that don't!), underscoring the importance of considering flagellar motility in the context of a bacterium's environment and evolutionary history. (2) Jumping spiders are agile, dexterous jumpers capable of taking off and landing on a wide range of substrates. We characterize jumping kinematics across 17 species of Amazonian jumping spiders to identify which aspects of their jumps are conserved and which vary with morphology or phylogeny. We introduce a computational framework to infer modal dynamics in motile living systems, providing a general approach for analyzing biological movement across scales and species.