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Natural groups of animals, such as swarms of social insects, exhibit astonishing degrees of task specialization, useful to address complex tasks and to survive. This is supported by phenotypic plasticity: individuals sharing the same…
Pedestrian crowds often include social groups, i.e. pedestrians that walk together because of social relationships. They show characteristic configurations and influence the dynamics of the entire crowd. In order to investigate the impact…
We propose a novel computational method to extract information about interactions among individuals with different behavioral states in a biological collective from ordinary video recordings. Assuming that individuals are acting as finite…
The movement of a flock with a single leader (and a directed path from it to every agent) can be stabilized. Nonetheless for large flocks perturbations in the movement of the leader may grow to a considerable size as they propagate…
Cooperation is ubiquitous ranging from multicellular organisms to human societies. Population structures indicating individuals' limited interaction ranges are crucial to understand this issue. But it is still at large to what extend…
Inspired by motile cells in tissue formation, we find that active systems of self-aligning adhesive particles undergo ballistic aggregation through a flocking transition. This kinetic regime emerges when the cluster persistence length grows…
We study the evolution of dense clumps and provide argument that the existence of the clumps is not limited by the crossing time of the clump. We claim that the lifetimes of the clumps are determined by the turbulent motions on larger scale…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
We use interacting particle systems to investigate survival and extinction of a species with colonies located on each site of $\mathbb {Z}^d$. In each of the four models studied, an individual in a local population can reproduce, die or…
Collective behaviour in biological systems pitches us against theoretical challenges way beyond the borders of ordinary statistical physics. The lack of concepts like scaling and renormalization is particularly grievous, as it forces us to…
The remarkable cohesion and coordination observed in moving animal groups and their collective responsiveness to threats are thought to be mediated by scale-free correlations, where changes in the behavior of one animal influence others in…
Aggregation is a common behavior by which groups of organisms arrange into cohesive groups. Whether suspended in the air (like honey bee clusters), built on the ground (such as army ant bridges), or immersed in water (such as sludge worm…
Coherently moving flocks of birds, beasts or bacteria are examples of living matter with spontaneous orientational order. How do these systems differ from thermal equilibrium systems with such liquid-crystalline order? Working with a…
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…
Despite the fact that grouping behavior has been actively studied for over a century, the relative importance of the numerous proposed fitness benefits of grouping remain unclear. We use a digital model of evolving prey under simulated…
A swarm of preys when attacked by a predator is known to rely on their cooperative interactions to escape. Understanding such interactions of collectively moving preys and the emerging patterns of their escape trajectories still remain…
The many-body dynamics exhibited by living objects include group formation within a population, and the non-equilibrium process of attrition between two opposing populations due to competition or conflict. We show analytically and…
In a world in which many pressing global issues require large scale cooperation, understanding the group size effect on cooperative behavior is a topic of central importance. Yet, the nature of this effect remains largely unknown, with lab…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…
Wasps, bees, ants and termites all make effective use of their environment and resources by displaying collective swarm intelligence. Termite colonies - for instance - build nests with a complexity far beyond the comprehension of the…