Stefania Melillo

TL;DR: It is found that information about direction changes propagates across the flock with a linear dispersion law and negligible attenuation, hence minimizing group decoherence and suggesting that swift decision-making may be the adaptive drive for the strong behavioural polarization observed in many living groups.

TL;DR: It is found that correlation increases sharply with the swarm's density, indicating that the interaction between midges is based on a metric perception mechanism, suggesting that correlation, rather than order, is the true hallmark of collective behaviour in biological systems.

TL;DR: By gathering three-dimensional data on swarms of midges in the field, it is found that swarms tune their control parameter and size so as to maintain a scaling behavior of the correlation function, and correlation length and susceptibility scale with the system's size and swarms exhibit a near-maximal degree of correlation at all sizes.

TL;DR: This work proposes novel dynamical equations for the collective motion of polarized animal groups that account for correlated turning including solely social forces and derives a new model of collective motion based on a generalized coordinates of motion akin to a Hamiltonian formulation for rotations.

TL;DR: A novel dynamical inference technique, based on the principle of maximum entropy, is introduced, which accodomates network rearrangements and overcomes the problem of slow experimental sampling rates and concludes that bird orientations are in a state of local quasi-equilibrium over the interaction length scale.