Collective behaviour is a fascinating and easily observable phenomenon, attractive to a wide range of researchers. In biology, computational models have been extensively used to investigate various properties of collective behaviour, such as: transfer of information across the group, benefits of grouping (defence against predation, foraging), group decision-making process, and group behaviour t...

What do you call a group of starlings? Collections of animals have been given some of the most fanciful, and sometimes unusual, nouns. Therefore, it is little surprise that “What do you call a group of ...?” is one of the first questions asked of scientists studying collective animal behaviour. Tuneful finches are known as a charm, whilst corvids do less well: collections of crows and ravens ar...

Collective animal behaviour is the study of how interactions between individuals produce group level patterns, and why these interactions have evolved. This study has proved itself uniquely interdisciplinary, involving physicists, mathematicians, engineers as well as biologists. Almost all experimental work in this area is related directly or indirectly to mathematical models, with regular move...

In recent years, the concept of self-organization has been used to understand collective behaviour of animals. The central tenet of self-organization is that simple repeated interactions between individuals can produce complex adaptive patterns at the level of the group. Inspiration comes from patterns seen in physical systems, such as spiralling chemical waves, which arise without complexity a...

Collective behaviour models can predict behaviours of schools, flocks, and herds. However, in many cases, these models make biologically unrealistic assumptions in terms of the sensory capabilities of the organism, which are applied across different species. We explored how sensitive collective behaviour models are to these sensory assumptions. Specifically, we used parameters reflecting the vi...

This article proposes an heuristics for the automatic computation of interactions in reactive multi-agent system. It describes first the Interac-DEC-POMDP formalism and then focuses on a algorithm based on reinforcement learning techniques and distribution of individual rewards among agents to build interaction and collective behaviour in a sub-class of DEC-POMDP. These techniques produce adapt...

Social animals commonly form aggregates that exhibit emergent collective behaviour, with group dynamics that are distinct from the behaviour of individuals. Simple models can qualitatively reproduce such behaviour, but only with large numbers of individuals. But how rapidly do the collective properties of animal aggregations in nature emerge with group size? Here, we study swarms of Chironomus ...

Biological systems such as yeast show coordinated activity driven by chemical communication between cells. Here, we show how experiments with coupled chemical oscillators can provide insights into collective behaviour in cellular systems. Two methods of coupling the oscillators are described: exchange of chemical species with the surrounding solution and computer-controlled illumination of a li...

Structures influence how individuals interact and, therefore, shape the collective behaviours that emerge from these interactions. Here I show that the structure of a nest influences the collective behaviour of harvester ant colonies. Using network analysis, I quantify nest architecture and find that as chamber connectivity and redundancy of connections among chambers increase, so does a colony...