Abstract
Collective self-organization is a widely studied topic in animal behavior, but it also attracts the attention of researchers studying crowds of people. The creation and dynamics of self-organized structures in animals have been often studied by means of numerical simulation, also considering how they would change in relation to the surrounding environment (e.g. a predator approaching a flock of birds). However, little has been done to research possible means to influence swarm behavior as a whole. In this work, we study how soldier crabs react to a moving light and how their individual reaction is amplified by swarm size. A numerical model is created to reproduce experimental data and used to assess more in detail swarm dynamics. Results show that crabs can self-organize better in the presence of an external stimulus and their capacity to show a collective behavior also depends on swarm size. In particular, the moving light results particularly efficient in inducing swarming for medium-sized swarms, while becoming potentially detrimental at high densities. Results are expected to increase the knowledge on self-organized structures in animals, but also help in the assessment of efficacy in the frame of information-provision in human crowds.
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Notes
- 1.
If a model can reproduce experimental results, it does not necessarily mean that assumptions are correct. It is simply a first step toward a longer validation process.
- 2.
An hypothesis is that the fairly omnidirectional distribution of crab’s legs allows them to estimate the pressure from each direction and thus feel which one is dominant when inside a cluster.
- 3.
An assessment at each time step would be also reasonable, but the “once per turn” approach was chosen because it is closer to the quantity measured experimentally.
- 4.
Note that this is not to be intended in its strict biological meaning; crabs are not known for releasing pheromone while moving.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by JST-Mirai Program Grant Number JPMJMI20D1 and by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K14992 and 20K20143. In addition, the authors are grateful to Yasuko Makino, Xiaolu Jia and Sakurako Tanida for their help in the experiments and video analysis. Finally, a special thanks to Lorenzo Vanoni (Attratech Sagl) who helped in the construction of the experimental equipment.
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Feliciani, C., Murakami, H., Tomaru, T., Nishiyama, Y. (2022). Stimulus-Induced Swarming in Soldier Crabs. In: Chopard, B., Bandini, S., Dennunzio, A., Arabi Haddad, M. (eds) Cellular Automata. ACRI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13402. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14926-9_26
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