Related papers: The Fast Wandering of Slow Birds
Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…
Many lamellar systems exhibit strongly anisotropic diffusion. When the diffusion across the lamellae is slow, an alternative mechanism for transverse transport becomes important. A tracer particle can propagate in the direction normal to…
Flocking is a paradigmatic example of collective animal behaviour, where decentralized interaction rules give rise to a globally ordered state. In the emergence of order out of self-organization we find similarities between biological…
We study a model of flocking in order to describe the transitions during the collective motion of organisms in three dimensions (e.g., birds). In this model the particles representing the organisms are self-propelled, i.e., they move with…
Bird flocking is a striking example of collective animal behaviour. A vivid illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the aerial display of vast flocks of starlings gathering at dusk over the roost and swirling with extraordinary…
One of the most impressive features of moving animal groups is their ability to perform sudden coherent changes in travel direction. While this collective decision can be a response to an external perturbation, such as the presence of a…
Birds in a flock move in a correlated way, resulting in large polarization of velocities. A good understanding of this collective behavior exists for linear motion of the flock. Yet observing actual birds, the center of mass of the group…
Speed fluctuations of individual birds in natural flocks are moderate, due to the aerodynamic and biomechanical constraints of flight. Yet the spatial correlations of such fluctuations are scale-free, namely they have a range as wide as the…
We present a quantitative continuum theory of ``flocking'': the collective coherent motion of large numbers of self-propelled organisms. Our model predicts the existence of an ``ordered phase'' of flocks, in which all members of the flock…
Diffusion and anomalous diffusion are widely observed and used to study movement across organisms, resulting in extensive use of the mean and mean-squared displacement (MSD). However, these measures - corresponding to specific displacement…
As the constituents of a flock are polar, one expects a fore-aft asymmetry in their interactions. We show here that the resulting antisymmetric part of the "exchange coupling" between a bird and its neighbours, if large enough, destabilizes…
Efficient collective response to external perturbations is one of the most striking abilities of a biological system. Signal propagation through the group is an important condition for the imple- mentation of such a response. Information…
Several experiments on tagged molecules or particles in living systems suggest that they move anomalously slow - their mean squared displacement (MSD) increase slower than linearly with time. Leading models aimed at understanding these…
We bound the time it takes for a group of birds to reach steady state in a standard flocking model. We prove that (i) within single exponential time fragmentation ceases and each bird settles on a fixed flying direction; (ii) the flocking…
The aim of the present paper is to elucidate the transition from collective to random behavior exhibited by various mathematical models of bird flocking. In particular, we compare Vicsek's model [Viscek et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1226 --…
There are various cases of animal movement where behaviour broadly switches between two modes of operation, corresponding to a long distance movement state and a resting or local movement state. Here a mathematical description of this…
Variation in genotypes may be responsible for differences in dispersal rates, directional biases, and growth rates of individuals. These traits may favor certain genotypes and enhance their spatio-temporal spreading into areas occupied by…
We consider statistical patterns of variation in growth rates for over 400 species of breeding birds across North America surveyed from 1966 to 1998. We report two results. First, the standard deviation of population growth rates decays as…
A mesoscopic model of a diblock copolymer is used to study the motion of a grain boundary separating two regions of perfectly ordered lamellar structures under an oscillatory but uniform shear flow. The case considered is a grain boundary…
A connection is made between the random turns model of vicious walkers and random permutations indexed by their increasing subsequences. Consequently the scaled distribution of the maximum displacements in a particular asymmeteric version…