Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35750698›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2022

Scale-free behavioral cascades and effective leadership in schooling fish.

Julia Múgica, Jordi Torrents, Javier Cristín, Andreu Puy, M Carmen Miguel, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
7citing papers in PubMed
2.2field-weighted citation impact, top 12% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

7 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. From Lévy walks to Brownian motion in schools of zebrafish (Danio rerio).The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2026
    Article
  2. A hitchhiker's guide to active motion.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2025
    Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.

Julia MúgicaDepartament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, 08034, Barcelona, Spain.
Jordi TorrentsDepartament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, 08034, Barcelona, Spain.
Javier CristínIstituto Sistemi Complessi, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, UOS Sapienza, 00185, Rome, Italy.
Andreu PuyDepartament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, 08034, Barcelona, Spain.
M Carmen MiguelDepartament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, Martí i Franquès 1, 08028, Barcelona, Spain. carmen.miguel@ub.edu.
Romualdo Pastor-SatorrasDepartament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, 08034, Barcelona, Spain. romualdo.pastor@upc.edu.
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · ESInstitute for Complex Systems · ITUniversitat de Barcelona · ES

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Behavioral contagion and the presence of behavioral cascades are natural features in groups of animals showing collective motion, such as schooling fish or grazing herbivores. Here we study empirical behavioral cascades observed in fish schools defined as avalanches of consecutive large changes in the heading direction of the trajectory of fish. In terms of a minimum turning angle introduced to define a large change, avalanches are characterized by distributions of size and duration showing scale-free signatures, reminiscent of self-organized critical behavior. We observe that avalanches are generally triggered by a small number of fish, which act as effective leaders that induce large rearrangements of the group's trajectory. This observation motivates the proposal of a simple model, based in the classical Vicsek model of collective motion, in which a given individual acts as a leader subject to random heading reorientations. The model reproduces qualitatively the empirical avalanche behavior observed in real schools, and hints towards a connection between effective leadership, long range interactions and avalanche behavior in collective movement.

Indexed as

Social BehaviorSwimmingAnimalsBehavior, AnimalFishesLeadershipModels, Biological

Identifiers

PMID35750698
PMCPMC9232620
OpenAlexW4283374458

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.