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Aerial displays of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) at their communal roosts are complex: thousands of individuals form multiple flocks which are continually changing shape and density, while splitting and merging. To understand these complex…
Self-organization of a biologically motivated swarm into smaller subgroups of different velocities is found by solving a 1-dimensional adaptive-velocity swarm, in which the velocity of an agent is averaged over a finite local radius of…
We propose a new model in order to study behaviors of self-organized system such as a group of animals. We assume that the individuals have two degrees of freedom corresponding one to their internal state and the other to their external…
Developmental processes in multicellular organisms occur far from equilibrium, yet produce complex patterns with astonishing reproducibility. We measure the precision and reproducibility of bilaterally symmetric fly wings across the natural…
Recent developments in automated tracking allow uninterrupted, high-resolution recording of animal trajectories, sometimes coupled with the identification of stereotyped changes of body pose or other behaviors of interest. Analysis and…
Collective behaviour in living systems is observed across many scales, from bacteria to insects, to fish shoals. Zebrafish have emerged as a model system amenable to laboratory study. Here we report a three-dimensional study of the…
Hierarchical structures are ubiquitous in human and animal societies, but a fundamental understanding of their raison d'\^etre has been lacking. Here, we present a general theory in which hierarchies are obtained as the optimal design that…
We record and analyze the movement patterns of the marsupial {\it Didelphis aurita} at different temporal scales. Animals trajectories are collected at a daily scale by using spool-and-line techniques, and with the help of radio-tracking…
The explosion of data on animal behavior in more natural contexts highlights the fact that these behaviors exhibit correlations across many time scales. But there are major challenges in analyzing these data: records of behavior in single…
Automated tracking of animal movement allows analyses that would not otherwise be possible by providing great quantities of data. The additional capability of tracking in realtime - with minimal latency - opens up the experimental…
Ecological systems are complex dynamical systems. Modelling efforts on ecosystems' dynamical stability have revealed that population dynamics, being highly nonlinear, can be governed by complex fluctuations. Indeed, experimental and field…
Insects exhibit remarkable cognitive skills in the field and several cognitive abilities have been demonstrated in Drosophila in the laboratory. By devising an ethologically relevant experimental setup that also allows comparison of…
In animal societies as well as in human crowds, many observed collective behaviours result from self-organized processes based on local interactions among individuals. However, models of crowd dynamics are still lacking a systematic…
We characterize the computation of motion in the fly visual system as a mapping from the high dimensional space of signals in the retinal photodetector array to the probability of generating an action potential in a motion sensitive neuron.…
We use immobility as an origin and reference for the measurement of locomotor behavior; speed, the direction of walking and the direction of facing as the three degrees of freedom shaping fly locomotor behavior, and cocaine as the parameter…
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…
Fish, birds, insects and robots frequently swim or fly in groups. During their 3 dimensional collective motion, these agents do not stop, they avoid collisions by strong short-range repulsion, and achieve group cohesion by weak long-range…
Better understanding the natural world is a crucial task with a wide range of applications. In environments with close proximity between humans and animals, such as zoos, it is essential to better understand the causes behind animal…
Deterministic many-body systems governed by simple interactions can self-organize into macroscopic patterns, and the determinants of long-time behavior are assumed to be encoded in the initial configuration. Here we show that predictability…
Precise temporal coordination of gene expression is crucial for many developmental processes. One central question in developmental biology is how such coordinated expression patterns are robustly controlled. During embryonic development of…