THE COMPLEXITY OF MOVING ANIMALS

Romualdo Pastor-Satorras (Personal webpage)

The collective motion of animal groups, ranging from migrating mammal herds and flocking birds to trailing ants and swarming insects, exhibits strikingly complex spatiotemporal patterns across vast scales. These emergent behaviors, governed by local interactions among individuals, have fascinated scientists across disciplines. In the field of statistical physics, interest in this phenomenon arised with the flocking model introduced by Vicsek and coworkers in 1995, in which a clear analogy could be drawn between the ordered structure of moving animals and classical phase transition. Initially driven by the study of simplified models of self-propelled particles, the field has recently experienced and important boost due significant advancements in imaging and, in particular, tracking technologies, which now enable high-resolution reconstructions of the trajectories of numerous unmarked individuals within natural or experimental settings. These innovations have opened to the development of more refined, data-driven approaches to the study of the behavior and dynamics of groups of moving animals. Here, we will explore how the tools of statistical mechanics and complex systems science can be applied to the analysis of collective animal motion, with a special focus on fish schools, an ideal experimental system due to their accessibility and easy control.