ArticleBehavioral ecology and sociobiology2019
Complex patterns of collective escape in starling flocks under predation.
Article in Behavioral ecology and sociobiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Coevolutionary attack and avoidance strategies in predators and grouping prey.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- A mechanistic understanding of collective escape in starling flocks.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Controlling noisy herds: Temporal network restructuring improves control of indecisive collectives.Science advances · 2026Article
- Evidence for natural selection shaping the evolution of collective behavior among globalbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Behavioural response of prey to repeated attacks by non-coordinating predators.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Collective responses of flocking sheep (Ovis aries) to a herding dog (border collie).Communications biology · 2024Article
- A robotic falcon induces similar collective escape responses in different bird species.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Lekking as collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Characterization of bird formations using fuzzy modelling.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Starling-Behavior-Inspired Flocking Control of Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm in Complex Environments with Dynamic Obstacles.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Deterrence of birds with an artificial predator, the RobotFalcon.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Raptors avoid the confusion effect by targeting fixed points in dense aerial prey aggregations.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Emergence of splits and collective turns in pigeon flocks under predation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Self-organization of collective escape in pigeon flocks.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Song Morphing by Humpback Whales: Cultural or Epiphenomenal?Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Phototactic Flocking of Photochemical Micromotors.iScience · 2019Article
- Aerial attack strategies of hawks hunting bats, and the adaptive benefits of swarming.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
abstractCollective behaviour of animals has been a main focus of recent research, yet few empirical studies deal with this issue in the context of predation, a major driver of social complexity in many animal species. When starling ( SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Patterns of collective escape in flocks of starlings have always intrigued laymen and scientists. A detailed analysis of their complex dynamics has been lacking so far, and is the focus of our present study: we analysed video footage of hunting by falcons on flocks of thousands of starlings and show how patterns of collective escape (namely flash expansion, blackening, wave event, vacuole, cordon and split) depend on the preceding pattern and on details of attack. A higher frequency of attack during a hunting sequence resulted in a higher frequency of collective escape events. Flash expansion happened most often when the predator attacks at greater speed. A wave event was most likely when the raptor attacks at medium (rather than high or low) speed. These results provide a first quantitative approach to social complexity in collective avoidance of a predator.
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