Related papers: Density distributions and depth in flocks
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…
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…
There is now experimental evidence that nearest-neighbour interactions in flocks of birds are metric free, i.e. they have no characteristic interaction length scale. However, models that involve interactions between neighbours that are…
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…
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 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…
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…
Interactions among neighboring birds in a flock cause an alignment of their flight directions. We show that the minimally structured (maximum entropy) model consistent with these local correlations correctly predicts the propagation of…
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…
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…
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…
Flocking is a fascinating phenomenon observed across a wide range of living organisms. We investigate, based on a simple self-propelled particle model, how the emergence of ordered motion in a collectively moving group is influenced by the…
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…
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…
Groups of animals often tend to arrange themselves in flocks that have characteristic spatial attributes and temporal dynamics. Using a dynamic continuum model for a flock of individuals, we find equilibria of finite spatial extent where…
Collective motion - or flocking - is an emergent phenomena that underlies many biological processes of relevance, from cellular migrations to animal groups movement. In this work, we derive scaling relations for the fluctuations of the mean…
Efficient collective response to external perturbations is one of the most striking abilities of a biological system. Signal propagation through the group is an important condition for the imple- mentation of such a response. Information…
We study the spatial patterns formed by a system of interacting particles where the mobility of any individual is determined by the population crowding at two different spatial scales. In this way we model the behavior of some biological…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…