Institute for Applied Physics, TU Wien, A-1040, Wien, Austria.
Institut für Theoretische Physik: Weiche Materie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2024 Mar 22;15(1):2591. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-46426-1.
Zebrafish constitute a convenient laboratory-based biological system for studying collective behavior. It is possible to interpret a group of zebrafish as a system of interacting agents and to apply methods developed for the analysis of systems of active and even passive particles. Here, we consider the effect of group size. We focus on two- and many-body spatial correlations and dynamical order parameters to investigate the multistate behavior. For geometric reasons, the smallest group of fish which can exhibit this multistate behavior consisting of schooling, milling and swarming is three. We find that states exhibited by groups of three fish are similar to those of much larger groups, indicating that there is nothing more than a gradual change in weighting between the different states as the system size changes. Remarkably, when we consider small groups of fish sampled from a larger group, we find very little difference in the occupancy of the state with respect to isolated groups, nor is there much change in the spatial correlations between the fish. This indicates that fish interact predominantly with their nearest neighbors, perceiving the rest of the group as a fluctuating background. Therefore, the behavior of a crowd of fish is already apparent in groups of three fish.
斑马鱼构成了一个方便的基于实验室的生物系统，用于研究集体行为。可以将一群斑马鱼解释为一个相互作用的代理系统，并应用为分析主动甚至被动粒子系统而开发的方法。在这里，我们考虑了群体规模的影响。我们专注于二体和多体空间相关性和动态序参量，以研究多态行为。由于几何原因，最小的可以表现出由成群、旋转和蜂拥三种状态的鱼群。我们发现，由三条鱼组成的鱼群所表现出的状态与更大的鱼群相似，这表明随着系统尺寸的变化，不同状态之间的权重只是逐渐变化，没有任何变化。值得注意的是，当我们考虑从小型鱼群中采样的小型鱼群时，我们发现与孤立的鱼群相比，鱼群的占据状态几乎没有差异，鱼群之间的空间相关性也没有太大变化。这表明鱼主要与它们最近的邻居相互作用，将其余的鱼群视为波动的背景。因此，鱼群的行为在三条鱼的鱼群中已经很明显。
