Related papers: Quantifying the interplay between environmental an…
The relative importance of Lagrangian and population dynamics on spatial pattern formation in the distribution of plankton near the ocean's surface is investigated. Phytoplankton and zooplankton are treated as biologically interacting…
We study the collective motion of confined spherical microswimmers such as active colloids which we model by so-called squirmers. To simulate hydrodynamic flow fields including thermal noise, we use the method of multi-particle collision…
Many organisms in nature use local interactions to generate global cooperative phenomena. To unravel how the behavior of individuals generates effective interactions within a group, we introduce a simple model, wherein each agent senses the…
The spatiotemporal dynamics in systems of active self-propelled particles is controlled by the propulsion mechanism in combination with various direct interactions, such as steric repulsion, hydrodynamics, and chemical fields. Yet, these…
Plankton constitutes the productive base of aquatic ecosystems and plays an essential role in the global carbon cycle. The impact of hydrodynamic conditions on the biological activity of plankton species can manifest in a variety of…
This thesis focuses on the applications of mathematical tools and concepts brought from nonequilibrium statistical physics to the modeling of ecological problems. The first part provides a short introduction where the theoretical concepts…
Many animals in their natural habitat exhibit collective motion and form complex patterns to tackle environmental difficulties. Several physical and biological factors, such as animal motility, population densities, and chemical cues, play…
Underwater acoustic technologies are a key component for exploring the behavior of marine megafauna such as sea turtles, sharks, and seals. The animals are marked with acoustic devices (tags) that periodically emit signals encoding the…
Fish schools and bird flocks exhibit complex collective dynamics whose self-organization principles are largely unknown. The influence of hydrodynamics on such collectives has been relatively unexplored theoretically, in part due to the…
The microbiome constitutes a complex microbial ecology of interacting components that regulates important pathways in the host. Measurements of microbial abundances are key to learning the intricate network of interactions amongst microbes.…
We investigate the emergence of self-organised trails between two specific target areas in collective motion of social organisms by means of an agent-based model. We present numerical evidences that an increase in the efficiency of…
Quantifying fish community structure is essential for understanding biodiversity and ecosystem responses in a changing environment, yet existing survey methods provide limited high-frequency, quantitative observations. Conventional…
Behavioral contagion and the presence of behavioral cascades are natural features in groups of animals showing collective motion, such as schooling fish or grazing herbivores. Here we study empirical behavioral cascades observed in fish…
The transient behavior of an ecosystem with N random interacting species in the presence of a multiplicative noise is analyzed. The multiplicative noise mimics the interaction with the environment. We investigate different asymptotic…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Throughout the animal kingdom, animals frequently benefit from living in groups. Models of collective behaviour show that simple local interactions are sufficient to generate group morphologies found in nature (swarms, flocks and mills).…
Schooling, an archetype of collective behavior, emerges from the interactions of fish responding to visual and other informative cues mediated by their aqueous environment. In this context, a fundamental and largely unexplored question…
Analyzing and forecasting trajectories of agents like pedestrians and cars in complex scenes has become more and more significant in many intelligent systems and applications. The diversity and uncertainty in socially interactive behaviors…
Animals typically forage in groups. Social foraging can help animals avoid predation and decrease their uncertainty about the richness of food resources. Despite this, theoretical mechanistic models of patch foraging have overwhelmingly…
The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…