Ontogeny of collective behaviour

Understanding collective behavior in biological systems through potential field mechanisms

Collective behavior in biological systems emerges from local interactions among individuals, enabling groups to adapt to dynamic environments. Traditional modeling approaches, such as bottom-up and top-down models, have limitations in accurately representing these complex interactions. We propose a novel potential field mechanism that integrates local interactions and environmental influences to explain collective behavior. This study introduces dynamic potential fields, where individuals perceive and respond to local potential fields generated by environmental cues and other individuals. We develop a mathematical framework combining distributed learning and swarm control to simulate and analyze collective behavior under varying conditions. Our simulations span a variety of environmental conditions, including standard environments where organisms interact under typical conditions, high noise environments where interactions are disrupted by random fluctuations, high density environments with increased competition for space, high risk environments featuring areas of strong negative potential field, and multiple resource environments with varying degrees of resource availability. These simulations demonstrate the adaptability and resilience of biological groups to changing and challenging conditions. Results reveal how potential fields facilitate the emergence of stable and coordinated behaviors, providing insights into self-organization, cooperation, and competition in nature. This framework enhances our understanding of collective behavior and has implications for bio-robotics, distributed systems, and complex networks.

Collective decision-making during reproduction in social insects: a conceptual model for queen supersedure in honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Insect societies have served as excellent examples for co-ordinated decision-making. The production of sexuals is the most important group decision that social insects face since it affects both direct and indirect fitness. The behavioral processes by which queens are selected have been of particular interest since they are the primary egg layers that enable colony function. As a model system, previous research on honey bee reproduction has focused on swarming behavior and nest site selection. One significant gap in our knowledge of the collective decision-making process over reproduction is how daughter queens simply replace old or failing queens (=supersedure) rather than being reared for the purposes of colony fission (=swarming) or queen loss (=emergency queen rearing). Here, I present a conceptual model that provides a framework for understanding the collective decisions by colonies to supersede their mother queens, as well as provide some key recommendations on future empirical work.

Development of neural circuits for social motion perception in schooling fish

The collective behavior of animal groups emerges from the interactions among individuals. These social interactions produce the coordinated movements of bird flocks and fish schools, but little is known about their developmental emergence and neurobiological foundations. By characterizing the visually based schooling behavior of the micro glassfish Danionella cerebrum, we found that social development progresses sequentially, with animals first acquiring the ability to aggregate, followed by postural alignment with social partners. This social maturation was accompanied by the development of neural populations in the midbrain that were preferentially driven by visual stimuli that resemble the shape and movements of schooling fish. Furthermore, social isolation over the course of development impaired both schooling behavior and the neural encoding of social motion in adults. This work demonstrates that neural populations selective for the form and motion of conspecifics emerge with the experience-dependent development of collective movement.

Development of neural circuits for social motion perception in schooling fish

Many animals move in groups, where collective behavior emerges from the interactions amongst individuals. These social interactions produce the coordinated movements of bird flocks and fish schools, but little is known about their developmental emergence and neurobiological foundations. By characterizing the visually-based schooling behavior of the micro glassfish Danionella cerebrum, here we found that social development progresses sequentially, with animals first acquiring the ability to aggregate, followed by postural alignment with social partners. This social maturation was accompanied by the development of neural populations in the midbrain and forebrain that were preferentially driven by visual stimuli that resemble the shape and movements of schooling fish. The development of these neural circuits enables the social coordination required for collective movement.

A multi-scale review of the dynamics of collective behaviour: from rapid responses to ontogeny and evolution

Collective behaviours, such as flocking in birds or decision making by bee colonies, are some of the most intriguing behavioural phenomena in the animal kingdom. The study of collective behaviour focuses on the interactions between individuals within groups, which typically occur over close ranges and short timescales, and how these interactions drive larger scale properties such as group size, information transfer within groups and group-level decision making. To date, however, most studies have focused on snapshots, typically studying collective behaviour over short timescales up to minutes or hours. However, being a biological trait, much longer timescales are important in animal collective behaviour, particularly how individuals change over their lifetime (the domain of developmental biology) and how individuals change from one generation to the next (the domain of evolutionary biology). Here, we give an overview of collective behaviour across timescales from the short to the long, illustrating how a full understanding of this behaviour in animals requires much more research attention on its developmental and evolutionary biology. Our review forms the prologue of this special issue, which addresses and pushes forward understanding the development and evolution of collective behaviour, encouraging a new direction for collective behaviour research. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Collective behaviour through time'.