Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study
المؤلفون: Ballerini, M., Cabibbo, N., Candelier, R., Cavagna, A., Cisbani, E., Giardina, I., Lecomte, V., Orlandi, A., Parisi, G., Procaccini, A., Viale, M., Zdravkovic, V.
المصدر: PNAS, 105, 1232-1237 (2008)
سنة النشر: 2007
المجموعة: Condensed Matter
Quantitative Biology
مصطلحات موضوعية: Quantitative Biology - Populations and Evolution, Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics
الوصف: Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional position of individual birds in airborne flocks of few thousands members, we prove that the interaction does not depend on the metric distance, as most current models and theories assume, but rather on the topological distance. In fact, we discover that each bird interacts on average with a fixed number of neighbours (six-seven), rather than with all neighbours within a fixed metric distance. We argue that a topological interaction is indispensable to maintain flock's cohesion against the large density changes caused by external perturbations, typically predation. We support this hypothesis by numerical simulations, showing that a topological interaction grants significantly higher cohesion of the aggregation compared to a standard metric one.
Comment: To be submitted to PNAS - 25 pages
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0711437105
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.1916
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.0709.1916
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv