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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Recent experimental evidence suggests that interactions in flocks of birds do not involve a characteristic length scale. Bird flocks have also been revealed to have an inhomogeneous density distribution, with the density of birds near the…
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…
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…
Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also…
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…
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 correlated motion of flocks is an instance of global order emerging from local interactions. An essential difference with analogous ferromagnetic systems is that flocks are active: animals move relative to each other, dynamically…
We present a general framework for modeling a wide selection of flocking scenarios under free boundary conditions. Several variants have been considered - including examples for the widely observed behavior of hierarchically interacting…
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…
We study a model of flocking in order to describe the transitions during the collective motion of organisms in three dimensions (e.g., birds). In this model the particles representing the organisms are self-propelled, i.e., they move with…
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,…
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 aim of the present paper is to elucidate the transition from collective to random behavior exhibited by various mathematical models of bird flocking. In particular, we compare Vicsek's model [Viscek et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1226 --…
We consider flocks of artificial birds and study the emergence of V-like formations during flight. We introduce a small set of fully distributed positioning rules to guide the birds' movements and demonstrate, by means of simulations, that…