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FRIMEDBIO-Fri prosj.st. med.,helse,biol

Determining the behavioral rules underlying collective behavior

Tildelt: kr 2,3 mill.

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Swarming behavior, the mysterious and fascinating phenomenon of animals moving together in groups--often remarkably coordinated--is everywhere in nature: Flocks of birds dancing in the sky, dense schools of herring traversing the oceans, or penguins march ing to their breeding grounds. Swarms have marveled humans since dawn of history--or pestered, remember, of the ten Biblical plagues, swarms of frogs, lice, flies, and locusts made up four of them--but our knowledge is far from complete. A question recei ving considerable attention in biology is: What behavioral rules do individuals in a swarm follow? The ambition of this project is to provide a general framework for answering the question, specifically, for the strongly schooling fish species Golden shi ner. With detailed individual motion data of Golden shiners, and a reverse-engineering process that parallels finding the law of gravitation from the planetary motions, we will elucidate the individual rules used by the fish. Until recently, it was hard to gather data on individuals within swarms, resulting in a bias toward studying swarms through simulation models rather than experiments. This is changing. New technologies (cameras, sonar, GPS, software) allow for tracking individuals, and researchers a re now obtaining high-resolution motion data in both field and laboratory settings. The methods developed in this project will help closing the gap between models and real swarms. A successful outcome will provide deep insights into the nature of swarms, helping to explain why collective behavior repeatedly emerges from natural selection. Collective behavior is central to such diverse fields as anthropology, biology, economics, politics, psychology and engineering. A better appreciation of swarming ther efore has the potential to impact a range of areas, for example our understanding of migrating cancer cells, management of fish populations, or herd mentality among financial investors.

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FRIMEDBIO-Fri prosj.st. med.,helse,biol

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