A variety of simple models has been proposed to understand the collective motion of animals. These models can be insightful but may lack important elements necessary to predict the motion of each individual in the collective. Adding more detail increases predictability but can make models too complex to be insightful.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding of animal collectives is limited by the ability to track each individual. We describe an algorithm and software that extract all trajectories from video, with high identification accuracy for collectives of up to 100 individuals. idtracker.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2017
The striking patterns of collective animal behavior, including ant trails, bird flocks, and fish schools, can result from local interactions among animals without centralized control. Several of these rules of interaction have been proposed, but it has proven difficult to discriminate which ones are implemented in nature. As a method to better discriminate among interaction rules, we propose to follow the slow birth of a rule of interaction during animal development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnimals in groups touch each other, move in paths that cross, and interact in complex ways. Current video tracking methods sometimes switch identities of unmarked individuals during these interactions. These errors propagate and result in random assignments after a few minutes unless manually corrected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the transient times for the onset of control of steady states by time-delayed feedback. The optimization of control by minimizing the transient time before control becomes effective is discussed analytically and numerically, and the competing influences of local and global features are elaborated. We derive an algebraic scaling of the transient time and confirm our findings by numerical simulations in dependence on feedback gain and time delay.
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