Evolving an Agent-Based Model to Probe Behavioral Rules in Flocks of Cowbirds

Flocks of brown-headed cowbirds, Molothrus ater, selforganize social environments, which have strong impacts on social learning and behavior. To understand the rules underlying self-organization of the social environment, I develop an agent-based model of cowbird social association and evolve it to match observed patterns of association measured from real birds. The behavioral rules evolved in the model provide insight into the type of rules real birds use to organize their social environment. The evolved models successfully predicted both association patterns and additional related movement variables measured from a new flock of birds.