Related papers: Statistical mechanics for natural flocks of birds
Flocks of birds exhibit a remarkable degree of coordination and collective response. It is not just that thousands of individuals fly, on average, in the same direction and at the same speed, but that even the fluctuations around the mean…
The correlated motion of flocks is an instance of global order emerging from local interactions. An essential difference with analogous ferromagnetic systems is that flocks are active: animals move relative to each other, dynamically…
We derive a new method to infer from data the out-of-equilibrium alignment dynamics of collectively moving animal groups, by considering the maximum entropy distribution consistent with temporal and spatial correlations of flight direction.…
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…
The aerial flocking of birds, or murmurations, has fascinated observers while presenting many challenges to behavioral study and simulation. We examine how the periphery of murmurations remain well bounded and cohesive. We also investigate…
When birds come together to form a flock, the distribution of their individual velocities narrows around the mean velocity of the flock. We argue that, in a broad class of models for the joint distribution of positions and velocities, this…
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…
Bird flocks are a paradigmatic example of collective motion. One of the prominent experimental traits discovered about flocks is the presence of long range velocity correlations between individuals, which allow them to influence each other…
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…
Flocks of starlings exhibit a remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information. Recent work demonstrated that individual starlings within large flocks respond to a fixed…
Recent experimental evidence suggests that interactions in flocks of birds do not involve a characteristic length scale. Bird flocks have also been revealed to have an inhomogeneous density distribution, with the density of birds near the…
Computational models of collective behavior in birds has allowed us to infer interaction rules directly from experimental data. Using a generic form of these rules we explore the collective behavior and emergent dynamics of a simulated…
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…
The cohesive collective motion (flocking, swarming) of autonomous agents is ubiquitously observed and exploited in both natural and man-made settings, thus, minimal models for its description are essential. In a model with continuous space…
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…
We introduce a stochastic agent-based model for the flocking dynamics of self-propelled particles that exhibit velocity-alignment interactions with neighbours within their field of view. The stochasticity in the dynamics of the model arises…
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…
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…
When animal groups move coherently in the form of a flock, their trajectories are not all parallel, the individuals exchange their position in the group. In this Letter we introduce a measure of this mixing dynamics, which we quantify as…
Several models of flocking have been promoted based on simulations with qualitatively naturalistic behavior. In this paper we provide the first direct application of computational modeling methods to infer flocking behavior from…