Collective States, Multistability and Transitional Behavior in Schooling Fish
By Kolbjørn Tunstrøm, Yael Katz, Christos C. Ioannou, Cristián Huepe, Matthew J. Lutz, Iain D. Couzin. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2013
421 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The spontaneous emergence of pattern formation is ubiquitous in nature, often arising as a collective phenomenon from interactions among a large number of individual constituents or sub-systems. Understanding, and controlling, collective behavior is dependent on determining the low-level dynamical principles from which spatial and temporal patterns emerge; a key question is whether different group-level patterns result from all components of a system responding to the same external factor, individual components changing behavior but in a distributed self-organized way, or whether multiple collective states co-exist for the same individual behaviors. Using schooling fish (golden shiners, in groups of 30 to 300 fish) as a model system, we demonstrate that collective motion can be effectively mapped onto a set of order parameters describing the macroscopic group structure, revealing the existence of at least three dynamically-stable collective states; swarm, milling and polarized groups. Swarms are characterized by slow individual motion and a relatively dense, disordered structure. Increasing swim speed is associated with a transition to one of two locally-ordered states, milling or highly-mobile polarized groups. The stability of the discrete collective behaviors exhibited by a group depends on the number of group members. Transitions between states are influenced by both external (boundary-driven) and internal (changing motion of group members) factors. Whereas transitions between locally-disordered and locally-ordered group states are speed dependent, analysis of local and global properties of groups suggests that, congruent with theory, milling and polarized states co-exist in a bistable regime with transitions largely driven by perturbations. Our study allows us to relate theoretical and empirical understanding of animal group behavior and emphasizes dynamic changes in the structure of such groups.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Global and Planetary Change, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7fff09392ce025e1d5634b73ed11dda16a055f3
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Does the field of animal personality provide any new insights for behavioral ecology (2017, background): “For example, individual speed functions as an explanatory factor for numerous aspects of social interactions and movement that might otherwise be considered as separate social behaviors (Katz et al. 2011; Tunstrøm et al. 2013).”
- Swarming, schooling, milling: phase diagram of a data-driven fish school model (2013, background): “This particular property was recently reported in experiments performed in groups of golden shiners [22].”