Related papers: From local collective behavior to global migratory…

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…

Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…

Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…

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…

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…

Thermal soaring enables birds to perform cost-efficient flights during foraging or migration trips. Yet, although all soaring birds exploit vertical winds effectively, this group contains species that vary strongly in their morphologies.…

Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the…

We investigate the collective dynamics of self-propelled particles able to probe and anticipate the orientation of their neighbors. We show that a simple anticipation strategy hinders the emergence of homogeneous flocking patterns. Yet,…

The study of self-propelled particles is a fast-growing research topic where biologically inspired movement is increasingly becoming of much interest. A relevant example is the collective motion of social insects, whose variety and…

Gliding saves much energy, and to make large distances using only this form of flight represents a great challenge for both birds and people. The solution is to make use of the so-called thermals, which are localized, warmer regions in the…

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…

In order to keep their cohesiveness during locomotion gregarious animals must make collective decisions. Many species boast complex societies with multiple levels of communities. A common case is when two dominant levels exist, one…

We present a model of soft active particles that leads to a rich array of collective behavior found also in dense biological swarms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Our model uses only local interactions, such as Vicsek-type…

In this paper, we present a model describing the collective motion of birds. The model introduces spontaneous changes in direction which are initialized by few agents, here referred as leaders, whose influence act on their nearest…

Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…

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 emergence of collective motion, also known as flocking or swarming, in groups of moving individuals who orient themselves using only information from their neighbors is a very general phenomenon that is manifested at multiple spatial…

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…

Animal movements have been related to optimal foraging strategies where self-similar trajectories are central. Most of the experimental studies done so far have focused mainly on fitting statistical models to data in order to test for…

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…