The Dynamics of Herds: From Individuals to Aggregations

Gueron, Shay; Levin, Simon A.; Rubenstein, Daniel I.

doi:10.1006/jtbi.1996.0144

Cited by 272 publications

(209 citation statements)

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“…As with other collective movement phenomena, e.g., in herding (8) or schooling and flocking (9), the key to understanding the emerging dynamics is the interaction between individuals. Here, we consider the strength of the interaction as dependent on the degree of nonlocality, which we accomplish by having the probability of an individual to retreat from the encountered active foreign marks depending on how long ago the marks were deposited.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stigmergy, collective actions, and animal social spacing

Giuggioli

Potts

Rubenstein

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Significance Marking animals avoid locations recently visited by others. We conceptualized this time nonlocal avoidance behavior as stigmergy, a form of mediated interaction that gives rise to coordinated behavior from seemingly independent individuals. In so doing, the concept of stigmergy is used beyond the realm of eusocial insects. To link the population spatiotemporal patterns that emerge from the individual nonlocal rules of interaction, we construct a collective movement model whereby randomly moving animals have the tendency to avoid marks left by a conspecific, depending on the age of the mark. As a result, we are able to quantify animal decision-making processes in terms of current and past locations of other individuals, linking behavior to history-dependent actions.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stigmergy, collective actions, and animal social spacing

Giuggioli

Potts

Rubenstein

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…This in turn allows groups to maintain their coherence and enables group members to realize the benefits of group living [7]. To date, however, most studies of collective behaviour have assumed that group members are identical in their movements and responses to their neighbours [2][3][4] (but see [8][9][10] for theoretical predictions and [11,12] for empirical observations about individual differences in groups). This common assumption of homogeneity contrasts with a large and growing body of work documenting consistent inter-individual differences in behaviour [13][14][15][16][17][18] and evidence that differences in the social affiliations between group members, and individual differences, can affect leadership and the collective decision-making process [12,19,20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of individuality in collective group movement

et al. 2013

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How different levels of biological organization interact to shape each other's function is a central question in biology. One particularly important topic in this context is how individuals' variation in behaviour shapes group-level characteristics. We investigated how fish that express different locomotory behaviour in an asocial context move collectively when in groups. First, we established that individual fish have characteristic, repeatable locomotion behaviours (i.e. median speeds, variance in speeds and median turning speeds) when tested on their own. When tested in groups of two, four or eight fish, we found individuals partly maintained their asocial median speed and median turning speed preferences, while their variance in speed preference was lost. The strength of this individuality decreased as group size increased, with individuals conforming to the speed of the group, while also decreasing the variability in their own speed. Further, individuals adopted movement characteristics that were dependent on what group size they were in. This study therefore shows the influence of social context on individual behaviour. If the results found here can be generalized across species and contexts, then although individuality is not entirely lost in groups, social conformity and group-size-dependent effects drive how individuals will adjust their behaviour in groups.

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“…Bats collectively select roosting sites that are crucial for survival (Kerth et al 2006). Swarms of insects (Buhl et al 2006), shoals of fishes (Reebs 2000;Hemelrijk & Hildenbrandt 2008;Ward et al 2008), flocks of birds (Selous 1931;Ballerini et al 2008), groups of carnivores (Gompper 1996), herds of ungulates (Gueron et al 1996;Prins 1996;Conradt 1998;Ruckstuhl 1998;Fischhoff et al 2007;Gautrais et al 2007) and troops of primates (Stewart & Harcourt 1994;Trillmich et al 2004;Meunier et al 2006;Sellers et al 2007;Sueur & Petit 2008) collectively decide group movements and group activities with important fitness consequences to all individuals (Conradt & Roper 2003;Rands et al 2003;Dostalkova & Spinka 2007). Cooperative species, such as eusocial insects and communal breeders, collectively decide job allocation in crucial communal enterprises, such as supplying forage to the hive (Beshers & Fewell 2001), rearing young (Clutton-Brock 1998) and hunting prey (Courchamp et al 2002).…”

Section: General Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Formally, an aggregation rule is defined as a function which assigns to each combination of Conradt (1998), Ruckstuhl (1998Ruckstuhl ( , 1999, Conradt & Roper (2000), Ruckstuhl & Neuhaus (2000, 2002 and List (2004) Selous (1931), Gueron et al (1996), Prins (1996), Couzin & Krause (2003), Couzin et al (2005), Ballerini et al (2008), Hemelrijk & Hildenbrandt (2008), Conradt & Roper (2009) Sumpter & Pratt (2009) individual inputs (e.g. votes) a resulting collective output (e.g.…”

Section: Key Concepts For the Analysis Of Group Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Group decisions in humans and animals: a survey

Conradt

List

2008

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

274

198

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Humans routinely make many decisions collectively, whether they choose a restaurant with friends, elect political leaders or decide actions to tackle international problems, such as climate change, that affect the future of the whole planet. We might be less aware of it, but group decisions are just as important to social animals as they are for us. Animal groups have to collectively decide about communal movements, activities, nesting sites and enterprises, such as cooperative breeding or hunting, that crucially affect their survival and reproduction. While human group decisions have been studied for millennia, the study of animal group decisions is relatively young, but is now expanding rapidly. It emerges that group decisions in animals pose many similar questions to those in humans. The purpose of the present issue is to integrate and combine approaches in the social and natural sciences in an area in which theoretical challenges and research questions are often similar, and to introduce each discipline to the other's key ideas, findings and successful methods. In order to make such an introduction as effective as possible, here, we briefly review conceptual similarities and differences between the sciences, and provide a guide to the present issue.Keywords: collective decisions; communal decisions; conflict resolution; cooperation; information sharing; social behaviour GENERAL BACKGROUNDHumans usually live in highly sophisticated societies. This implies that many important decisions are made not by individuals acting alone, but by groups of individuals acting collectively. Group decisions in humans range from small-scale decisions, such as those taken by groups of relatives, friends or colleagues, to large-scale decisions, such as nation-wide democratic elections and international agreements. Clearly, human societies cannot function without group decisions, and some of the most pressing problems facing humanity result from failures to reach a group consensus (e.g. the signing of the Kyoto treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions). Group decision making has been a central topic in all of the social sciences for millennia (e.g. Plato: The Republic 360 BC). Nevertheless, many questions remain open, particularly how conflicting interests and the sharing of dispersed information are actually, and should be, in principle, reconciled so as to facilitate cooperation and to reach outcomes that meet various optimality criteria. These are some of the fundamental questions of social choice theory (e.g. Arrow 1951Arrow /1963Austen-Smith & Banks 1999Sen 1999;Dryzek & List 2003). A large number of animal species also live in groups (Krause & Ruxton 2002), some of which can be very complex (e.g. eusocial bees, wasps, ants, termites and mole rats). Group decision making is just as important for social animals as it is for us (see Conradt & Roper 2005 for a review). Dispersing swarms of bees and ants collectively choose new nest sites on which their survival depends (Seeley & Buhrman 1999;Visscher 2007;Visscher & Seele...

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The Dynamics of Herds: From Individuals to Aggregations

Cited by 272 publications

References 0 publications

Stigmergy, collective actions, and animal social spacing

Stigmergy, collective actions, and animal social spacing

The role of individuality in collective group movement

Group decisions in humans and animals: a survey

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