Anyone who has moved furniture together with friends will appreciate that cooperative
transport requires some non-trivial communication. Yet ants are adept at collectively moving …

Over the course of their wildly successful proliferation across the earth, the insects as a
taxon have evolved enviable adaptations to their diverse habitats, which include adhesives …

Group formation in living systems typically results from a delicate balance of repulsive,
aligning, and attractive interactions. We found that a mere motility change of the individuals …

The emergence of collective motion among interacting, self-propelled agents is a central
paradigm in non-equilibrium physics. Examples of such active matter range from swimming …

Many sensory systems in cells and organisms share a recurring property called fold-change
detection (FCD). FCD describes a system whose dynamics–including amplitude and …

Collective behaviour in biological systems presents theoretical challenges beyond the
borders of classical statistical physics. The lack of concepts such as scaling and …

The dynamic patterns and coordinated motion displayed by groups of social animals are a
beautiful example of self-organization in natural far-from-equilibrium systems. Recent …

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 …

Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers,
that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices …

Animal aggregations are visually striking, and as such are popular examples of collective
behavior in the natural world. Quantitatively demonstrating the collective nature of such …