Related papers: From local collective behavior to global migratory…

Survival in groups of termites is known to be socially facilitated since individual longevity is increased together with the size of the group. Here we report on experimental evidence that survival as a function of group size in {\textit…

Motion is a typical reaction among animals and humans trying to reach better conditions in a changing world. This aspect has been studied intensively in social dilemmas where competing players' individual and collective interests are in…

Animals often exhibit changes in their behavior during migration. Telemetry data provide a way to observe geographic position of animals over time, but not necessarily changes in the dynamics of the movement process. Continuous-time models…

Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…

Navigating networked robot swarms often requires knowing where to go, sensing the environment, and path-planning based on the destination and barriers in the environment. Such a process is computationally intensive. Moreover, as the network…

The emergence of collective decision in swarms and their coordinated response to complex environments underscore the central role played by social transmission of information. Here, the different possible origins of information flow…

Collective locomotion of swimming and flying animals is fascinating in terms of individual-level fluid mechanics and group-level structure and dynamics. Here we bridge and relate these scales through a model of formation flight that views…

What is behind the \emph{wisdom of the crowds} described by Simons (2004)? It has been showed that insects may use gravitational fields to travel (Dreyer et al 2018) and we may ask whether the use of gravitational fields is enough to secure…

The evolution of leadership in migratory populations depends not only on costs and benefits of leadership investments but also on the opportunities for individuals to rely on cues from others through social interactions. We derive an…

Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…

Mathematical models for systems of interacting agents using simple local rules have been proposed and shown to exhibit emergent swarming behavior. Most of these models are constructed by intuition or manual observations of real phenomena,…

How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…

Natural flocks (aligned) and swarms (non-aligned) both exhibit features of near-criticality, challenging their treatment as two ends of the same phase transition. We present a model for the aggregation of active individuals, in which their…

Among natural biological flocks/swarms or even mass social activities, when the collective behaviors of the followers has been dominated by the moving direction or opinion of one leader group, it seems very difficult for later-coming…

In both animal and cell populations, the presence of leaders often underlies the success of collective migration processes, which we characterise by a group maintaining a cohesive configuration that consistently moves toward a target. We…

Today, many users are actively using Twitter to express their opinions and to share information. Thanks to the availability of the data, researchers have studied behaviours and social networks of these users. International migration studies…

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…

Cross-country soaring flights rely on intermittent atmospheric updrafts to cover long distances, producing trajectories that alternate between rapid relocation and local exploration. From a large dataset of paraglider, hang glider, and…

Anomalous diffusion or, more generally, anomalous transport, with nonlinear dependence of the mean-squared displacement on the measurement time, is ubiquitous in nature. It has been observed in processes ranging from microscopic movement of…

While the overarching pattern of biannual avian migration is well understood, there are significant questions pertaining to this phenomenon that invite further study. Necessary to any analysis of these questions is an understanding of how a…