- Title
- Two-level leader-follower organization in pigeon flocks
- Creator
- Chen, Zhiyong; Zhang, Hai-Tao; Chen, Xi; Chen, Duxin; Zhou, Tao
- Relation
- Europhysics Letters Vol. 112, Issue 2
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/112/20008
- Publisher
- EDP Sciences
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- The most attractive trait of collective animal behavior is the emergence of highly ordered structures (Cavagna A., Giardina I. and Ginelli F., Phys. Rev. Lett., 110 (2013) 168107). It has been conjectured that the interaction mechanism in pigeon flock dynamics follows a hierarchical leader-follower influential network (Nagy M., Ákos Z., Biro D. and Vicsek T., Nature, 464 (2010) 890). In this paper, a new observation is reported that shows that pigeon flocks actually adopt a much simpler two-level interactive network composed of one leader and some followers. By statistically analyzing the same experimental dataset, we show that for a certain period of time a sole leader determines the motion of the flock while the remaining birds are all followers directly copying the leader's direction with specific time delays. This simple two-level despotic organization is expected to save both motional energy and communication cost, while retaining agility and robustness of the whole group. From an evolutionary perspective, our results suggest that a two-level organization of group flight may be more efficient than a multilevel topology for small pigeon flocks.
- Subject
- interaction mechanism; pigeon flocks; time delays; two-level organization
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1329500
- Identifier
- uon:26174
- Identifier
- ISSN:0295-5075
- Language
- eng
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