Deciphering Interactions in Moving Animal Groups
By Jacques Gautrais, Francesco Ginelli, R. Fournier, S. Blanco, M. Soria, Hugues Chaté, Guy Theraulaz. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2012
320 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Collective motion phenomena in large groups of social organisms have long fascinated the observer, especially in cases, such as bird flocks or fish schools, where large-scale highly coordinated actions emerge in the absence of obvious leaders. However, the mechanisms involved in this self-organized behavior are still poorly understood, because the individual-level interactions underlying them remain elusive. Here, we demonstrate the power of a bottom-up methodology to build models for animal group motion from data gathered at the individual scale. Using video tracks of fish shoal in a tank, we show how a careful, incremental analysis at the local scale allows for the determination of the stimulus/response function governing an individual's moving decisions. We find in particular that both positional and orientational effects are present, act upon the fish turning speed, and depend on the swimming speed, yielding a novel schooling model whose parameters are all estimated from data. Our approach also leads to identify a density-dependent effect that results in a behavioral change for the largest groups considered. This suggests that, in confined environment, the behavioral state of fish and their reaction patterns change with group size. We debate the applicability, beyond the particular case studied here, of this novel framework for deciphering interactions in moving animal groups.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b2832f78d477f6c8d19335f56ee8351a0acefd8
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Computer Networks and Communications
In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “In the latter case, relatively continuous trajectories without sharp bends or kinks were observed, corresponding to persistently turning walkers rather than conventional random walks [632, 635].”
- Swarming, schooling, milling: phase diagram of a data-driven fish school model (2013, methodology): “In a previous work, Gautrais et al have determined the stimulus/response function that governs an individuals moving decisions in Barred flagtail (Kuhlia mugil) [1].”