Flocks: Collective animal motion

Large scale and striking patterns of collective motion are observed in a wide range of organisms from cellular swarms and ant-trails to flocks of birds circumnavigating the globe. We study these fascinating systems by building simple computational models, try to understand how they arise from local interactions among individuals and their environment, and why so many organisms have evolved these forms of motion that can potentially provide benefits to both individuals and groups as a whole.

Related publications:

[13] Vivek Jadhav, Vishwesha Guttal and Danny Ra M “Randomness in the choice of neighbours promotes cohesion in mobile animal groups.” 2022. Royal Society Open Science, Vol 9: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220124 ; PDF [Data and Codes]

[12] Jitesh Jhawar, Richard G. Morris, U. R. Amith-Kumar, M. Danny Raj, R. Harikrishnan, Tim Rogers and Vishwesha Guttal, 2020, Noise-Induced Schooling of Fish, Nature Physics, 16: 488–493  doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0787-y;  View PDF;  PDF;  Codes and Data

[11]Jitesh Jhawar and Vishwesha Guttal, 2020, Noise-induced Effects in Collective Dynamics and Inferring Local Interactions from Data, Phil. Tran. Roy Soc B, 375:20190381. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0381; [arxiv];  PDF; [Codes and Data]

[10] Gokul Nair, Athmanathan Senthilnathan, Srikanth Iyer, and Vishwesha Guttal, 2019, Fission-fusion dynamics and group-size dependent composition in heterogeneous populations, Physical Review E, 99, 032412, arXiv:1711.06882 [nlin.AO], Data and codes,  Download PDF. 

[9] Jitesh Jhawar, Richard Morris, and Vishwesha Guttal, 2019, Deriving mesoscopic models of collective behaviour for finite populations, In Handbook of Statistics Vol 40: Integrated Population Biology and Modeling  (edited by Arni Srini Rao and C R Rao), Part B, 551-594. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.host.2018.10.002;  Pre-print from Arxiv;  Codes and data on github.  Download PDF

[8]  Jaideep Joshi and Vishwesha Guttal, 2018, Demographic noise and cost of greenbeard can facilitate greenbeard cooperation, Evolution, 72:2595-2607, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13615

[7] Hari Sridhar and Vishwesha Guttal, 2018, Friendship across species borders: factors that facilitate and constrain heterospecific sociality, Phil. Trans. Royal Society of London B. 373: 20170014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0014, PDF

Media coverage:

Costs and benefits: Why birds of a feather sometimes don’t flock together in Indian Express, by Amitabh Sinha

Friends without Borders, in Deccan Herald, by Annie Megan Santamaria

ಜಾತಿಭೇದವಿಲ್ಲದ ಪ್ರಾಣಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ, in Prajaavaani, by Gubbi-Labs

[6] Jaideep Joshi, Iain D Couzin, Simon A Levin, Vishwesha Guttal, 2017, Mobility can promote the evolution of cooperation via emergent self-assortment dynamics, PLoS Computational Biology. 13(9): e1005732, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005732 and [BioRxiv]

[5] Christos C Ioannou, Vishwesha Guttal, Iain D Couzin, 2012, Predatory fish select for coordinated collective motion in virtual prey. Science. 337: 1212-1215 A video on YouTube.[PDF available from Iain Couzin’s publications page. Look for publication #69.]

Highlights: 
Perspectives, Science
Telegraph, India
National Public Radio
The Economist
Ed Yong @ Discover blog.

[4] Vishwesha Guttal*, Pawel Romanczuk*, Stephen J Simpson, Gregory A Sword, Iain D Couzin, 2011,  Cannibalism as a driver of the evolution of phase polyphenism in locusts. Ecology Letters, Vol 15:1158-1166 [*co-first authors]. PDF (Free from journal website).

Highlights:
Texas A&M AGRILIFE
Max-Planck Institute Press Release (in German)

[3] Vishwesha Guttal, Iain D Couzin, 2011, Leadership, collective motion and the evolution of migratory strategies, Communicative and Integrative Biology, 4:294 – 298. PDF.

[2] Vishwesha Guttal, Iain D. Couzin, 2010, Social interactions, information use and the evolution of collective migration, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 107:16172-16177. PDF.   Also see: Movies 1 and 2.

Highlights: 
From the Cover of PNAS
In This Issue of PNAS
Commentary by Simpson and Sword in PNAS
Commentary by Ramaswamy in J. Club for Cond Mat Phys           New York Times., Wired Science, DNA

[1] Debashish Chowdhury, Vishwesha Guttal, Katsuhiro Nishinari and Andreas Schadschneider, 2002,  “A Cellular Automata model of flow in ant-trails: non-monotonic variation of speed with density”, Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General: 35, L575-L577 (2002).  PDF.