Adult zebrafish showing schooling behavior. Credit: Christian Ziegler/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Across nature, animals from swarming insects to herding mammals can organize into seemingly choreographed motion. Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered that these coordinated movements arise from each animal following simple rules about where their neighbors are located.
Now, scientists studying zebrafish have shown that neighbors might also be moving to the same beat. The team revealed that fish swimming in pairs took turns to move; and, they synchronized the timing of these movements in a two-way process known as reciprocity. Then, in virtual reality experiments, the team could confirm that reciprocity was key to driving collective motion: by implementing this rhythmic rule, they could recreate natural schooling behavior in fish and virtual conspecifics.
The study published in Nature Communications was led by scientists from the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany (MPI-AB).
The results provide further mechanistic detail to our understanding of how animals self-organize into moving collectives. “We show that it takes two fish to tango,” says first author Guy Amichay, who conducted the work while a doctoral student at MPI-AB.
“Fish are coordinating the timing of their movements with that of their neighbor, and vice versa. This two-way rhythmic coupling is an important, but overlooked, force that binds animals in motion.”
Animals moving in synchrony are the most conspicuous examples of collective behavior in nature; yet many natural collectives synchronize not in space, but in time—fireflies synchronize their flashes, neurons synchronize their firing, and humans in concert halls synchronize the rhythm of clapping.
2024-05-23 11:51:01
Article from phys.org