Berlin 2018 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 63: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session BP/DY)
DY 63.1: Talk
Thursday, March 15, 2018, 15:00–15:15, H 2013
Do Predator attacks tune a collective of interacting agents to criticality and why? — •Pascal Klamser1, 2 and Pawel Romanczuk1, 2 — 1Institute for Theoretical Biology, Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — 2Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Based on theoretical considerations it is hypothesized that biological systems self-tune to criticality [1]. Motivated by this, we investigate the collective behavior of self-propelled agents at the phase transition from an ordered (parallel moving agents = school) to a disordered movement (swarm) and their reaction to a predator. Systematic numerical simulations show that at the phase transition the performance of the predator decreases. However, this decrease is not only caused by a better response of individuals to the predator, but also by complex spatial structures of the collective at the transition. This finding emphasizes the need of explicitly considering spatial models to describe biological systems, e.g. fish swarms. Beside different interaction-networks (voronoi, k-nearest neighbor, visual-field) an evolutionary algorithm was used to check for the relevance of the results.
[1] Mora, T. and Bialek, W. J Stat Phys (2011) 144: 268.