ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Intermittent collective dynamics emerge from conflicting imperatives in sheep herds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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48 citing papers in PubMed, 194 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gut microbial genetic variations are associated with exploratory behavior via SNV-driven metabolic regulation in a sheep model.Science China. Life sciences · 2026Article
- Controlling noisy herds: Temporal network restructuring improves control of indecisive collectives.Science advances · 2026Article
- Modeling collective behavior in groups of mice housed under semi-naturalistic conditions.eLife · 2025Article
- Quantifying animal social behaviour with ecological field methods.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The visual stimuli attributes instrumental for collective-motion-related decision-making in locusts.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Collective responses of flocking sheep (Ovis aries) to a herding dog (border collie).Communications biology · 2024Article
- Body orientation change of neighbors leads to scale-free correlation in collective motion.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Probing Asymmetric Interactions with Time-Separated Mutual Information: A Case Study Using Golden Shiners.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Non-local interaction in discrete Ricci curvature-induced biological aggregation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Derivation and simulation of a computational model of active cell populations: How overlap avoidance, deformability, cell-cell junctions and cytoskeletal forces affect alignment.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Beehive scale-free emergent dynamics.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Selective social interactions and speed-induced leadership in schooling fish.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Dynamical order and many-body correlations in zebrafish show that three is a crowd.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Novel automated method to assess group dynamics reveals deficits in behavioral contagion in rats with social deficits.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Scale-Free Chaos in the 2D Harmonically Confined Vicsek Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Modeling fashion as an emergent collective behavior of bored individuals.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Exploring the criticality hypothesis using programmable swarm robots with Vicsek-like interactions.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Appetizer on soft matter physics concepts in mechanobiology.Development, growth & differentiation · 2023Review
- A multi-scale review of the dynamics of collective behaviour: from rapid responses to ontogeny and evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- A mesoscale agent based modeling framework for flow-mediated infection transmission in indoor occupied spaces.Computer methods in applied mechanics and engineering · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Among the many fascinating examples of collective behavior exhibited by animal groups, some species are known to alternate slow group dispersion in space with rapid aggregation phenomena induced by a sudden behavioral shift at the individual level. We study this phenomenon quantitatively in large groups of grazing Merino sheep under controlled experimental conditions. Our analysis reveals strongly intermittent collective dynamics consisting of fast, avalanche-like regrouping events distributed on all experimentally accessible scales. As a proof of principle, we introduce an agent-based model with individual behavioral shifts, which we show to account faithfully for all collective properties observed. This offers, in turn, an insight on the individual stimulus/response functions that can generate such intermittent behavior. In particular, the intensity of sheep allelomimetic behavior plays a key role in the group's ability to increase the per capita grazing surface while minimizing the time needed to regroup into a tightly packed configuration. We conclude that the emergent behavior reported probably arises from the necessity to balance two conflicting imperatives: (i) the exploration of foraging space by individuals and (ii) the protection from predators offered by being part of large, cohesive groups. We discuss our results in the context of the current debate about criticality in biology.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.