Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany.
Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Biol Lett. 2020 Sep;16(9):20200436. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0436. Epub 2020 Sep 16.
Understanding the emergence of collective behaviour has long been a key research focus in the natural sciences. Besides the fundamental role of social interaction rules, a combination of theoretical and empirical work indicates individual speed may be a key process that drives the collective behaviour of animal groups. Socially induced changes in speed by interacting animals make it difficult to isolate the effects of individual speed on group-level behaviours. Here, we tackled this issue by pairing guppies with a biomimetic robot. We used a closed-loop tracking and feedback system to let a robotic fish naturally interact with a live partner in real time, and programmed it to strongly copy and follow its partner's movements while lacking any preferred movement speed or directionality of its own. We show that individual differences in guppies' movement speed were highly repeatable and in turn shaped key collective patterns: a higher individual speed resulted in stronger leadership, lower cohesion, higher alignment and better temporal coordination of the pairs. By combining the strengths of individual-based models and observational work with state-of-the-art robotics, we provide novel evidence that individual speed is a key, fundamental process in the emergence of collective behaviour.
长期以来，理解集体行为的出现一直是自然科学的一个主要研究重点。除了社会相互作用规则的基本作用外，理论和经验工作的结合表明，个体速度可能是驱动动物群体集体行为的一个关键过程。由于相互作用的动物会引起速度的社会性变化，因此很难将个体速度对群体行为的影响孤立出来。在这里，我们通过将孔雀鱼与仿生机器人配对来解决这个问题。我们使用闭环跟踪和反馈系统，让机器鱼实时与活体伙伴自然互动，并对其进行编程，使其能够强烈地复制和跟随伙伴的动作，而自身没有任何偏好的速度或方向性。我们表明，孔雀鱼运动速度的个体差异具有高度的可重复性，进而形成了关键的集体模式：个体速度越高，领导能力越强，凝聚力越低，对齐度越高，对的时间协调性越好。通过将基于个体的模型和观测工作与最先进的机器人技术相结合，我们提供了新的证据，表明个体速度是集体行为出现的一个关键的基本过程。
