Morphology

Purpose

Morphology is the language for describing structure and behavior of discovered patterns.

Visual Anchors from This Corpus

Near-ballistic translational form:

Low-speed meandering form:

High-tortuosity meander from motile run:

Terms

• symmetry: coarse structural balance (for example bilateral vs radial appearance).
• segmentation: visibly repeated substructures.
• swarm-like: multiple granular mass clusters moving in coupled ways.
• trajectory geometry: how a pattern moves over time (straight, curved, looping, drifting).

Important boundary:

• symmetry/segmentation/swarm are currently descriptive vocabulary,
• trajectory geometry is currently measured and indexed.

What We Measure Today

The measured morphology surface comes from metrics + morphometrics:

• pathTortuosity = pathLength / displacement.
• movementEfficiency = displacement / pathLength.

Interpretation:

• low tortuosity + high efficiency => directional transport,
• high tortuosity + low efficiency => meander/loop with limited net displacement.

Anchored examples:

• crossmap seed 0: path/displacement=1.0026.
• nnea seed 1: path/displacement=6.3610.
• motile seed 8: path/displacement=22.2946.

What Is Still Conceptual

A richer structural morphology index (explicit symmetry classes, segmentation detectors, swarm decomposition) is not yet implemented as first-class indexed fields.

Related Docs

• exact computed fields: ../contracts/MorphometricsAndTraits.md
• taxonomy pipeline context: Taxonomy.md
• ecology context: Ecology.md