Research
Research in the Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory involves the study of adaptive collective phenomena in animal groups such as bird flocks, fish schools and insect swarms using a combined experimental and theoretical approach. Animal groups frequently exhibit complex and coordinated collective behaviours that result from social interactions among individuals. Since they are both observable and manipulable, such groups are ideal subjects with which to develop and test mathematical models that link the behaviour of small components with the functioning and overall efficiency of their dynamic group-level properties. They provide unrivalled opportunities to quantify the behaviour of individual components within the context of the collective.
Some ongoing projects include:
- An experimental, mechanistic and evolutionary perspective of leadership and consensus decision-making in animal groups
- Leadership, collective behavior and the evolution of migration
- Cannibalism and collective behavior in swarming insects (locusts and crickets) and tadpoles
- Collective exploration in ants
- High performance computing for massively parallel evolutionary simulations of animal group behavior
Check out our Members page, and also our Publications, for more information about what's going on in the lab right now.