Tag Archives: individual heterogeneity

New paper out in Frontiers in Physiology

/ News Paper

I am happy to say that an exciting paper that I worked on with Shaun Killen, Christos Ioannou, and others is now available online in Frontiers in Physiology. In the paper we line out physiological performance curves, the nonlinear changes in the physiological traits and performance of animals across environmental gradients, and discuss their potential to change social behaviour and group functioning, and the ecological consequences

Figure depicting how animals physiological performance may hypothetically change across different environmental variables (A) and the way in which individuals my differ from one another in their performance curves (B).

The paper leans heavily on my 2020 TREE paper with Shaun and Andrew King, but goes further by focusing on individual heterogeneity in variability between individuals. The work is mostly theoretical because there is still very little empirical work done, so looking forward to test some of the ideas myself with Shaun and colleagues next year in terms of how fish differ in how they respond to severe droughts. You can download the paper open access here!

Reference
Killen, S. S., Cortese, D., Cotgrove, L., Jolles, J. W., Munson, A., and Christos, C. (2021). The potential for physiological performance curves to shape environmental effects on social behaviour. Front. Physiol. 12, 754719. doi:10.32942/osf.io/bh968.

New paper out in Frontiers in Physics on variability in speed effects

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I am excited to say that a new paper that I have been involved in came out today in Frontiers in Physics about the role of speed variability in collective animal behaviour.

A number of agent-based models have been developed to help understand how coordinated collective behaviour can emerge from simple interaction rules. Thereby, a common, simplifying assumption is that individual agents move with a constant speed. In this paper together with the team of Pawel Romenczuk and colleagues in Berlin, we critically re-asses this assumption and provide new theoretical evidence that shows variability in the speed of individuals can have profound effects on the emergent collective patterns.

A quick visualisation of some differently simulated groups differing in size and speed variability

I have long been working on the role of individual heterogeneity in collective behaviour and was therefore excited to collaborate with Pawel and his team to run in-depth computer simulations to start better consider behavioural variability as a source of heterogeneity in animal groups. You can find the paper (open access) here.

Reference:
Klamser, P. P., Gómez-Nava, L., Landgraf, T., Jolles, J. W., Bierbach, D., and Romanczuk, P. (2021). Impact of Variable Speed on Collective Movement of Animal Groups. Front. Phys. 9, 1–11. doi:10.3389/fphy.2021.715996.

New opinion paper out in TREE on fisheries effects on shoaling

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Today my latest paper came out in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Co-led by Valerio Sbragaglia at ICM in Barcelona (joint first-authorship) and with Marta Coll and Robert Arlinghaus, we provide a new perspective about the role that fisheries may have on the shoaling tendency and collective behaviour of exploited fish species. Besides discussing the different potential mechanisms (see also figure below), we highlight potential consequences for fish populations and food webs, and discuss possible repercussions for fisheries and conservation strategies.

It has been nice to work on the ideas of this paper and focusing a bit more on the important practical implications of my main research topic of individual heterogeneity and collective animal behaviour. I am looking forward to further work I will be doing with Valerio and our colleagues to start test some of the ideas we put forward in our paper and co-supervise students on the topic.

You can find the paper online here as well as a press release regarding our article. If you cannot access the paper, please send me an email!

Reference
Sbragaglia, V., Jolles, J. W., Coll, M., and Arlinghaus, R. (2021). Fisheries-induced changes of shoaling behaviour: mechanisms and potential consequences. Trends Ecol. Evol. 36, 885–888. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2021.06.015.

New paper out in TREE and on the front cover!

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I am excited to say that our review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, after already being available online, is out now in print and is shining on the front cover! I took this photo of this stunning stickleback school while snorkelling in the Bodensee to study their collective behaviour. Read our open access paper here.

Talk at SEB conference Florence

/ News Talk

The last couple days I have been in Florence for the SEB conference. What a great location to have a conference! Where else can you have pizza for breakfast?

On Tuesday I gave a talk about a mechanistic framework I am developing with Shaun Killen to understand the role of individual heterogeneity in collective behaviour. The sessions this year are all really relevant to me and saw lots of great talks and posters and nice to bump into academic friends from around the world. Too many new project ideas! But I think some nice new collaborations will come from it as well.

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New paper out in Current Biology!

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My latest paper on the collective behaviour of stickleback shoals is out today in the journal Current Biology!

Jolles, JW, Boogert, NJ, Sridhar, VH, Couzin, ID, Manica, A. (2017) Consistent individual differences drive collective behaviour and group functioning of schooling fish. Current Biology 27: 1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.08.004 (link).

Highly coordinated school of three-spined sticklebacks swimming in the blue waters of the Bodensee near Konstanz, Southern Germany. Photo: Jolle W. Jolles

Highly coordinated school of three-spined sticklebacks swimming in the blue waters of the Bodensee near Konstanz, Southern Germany. Photo: Jolle W. Jolles

New research sheds light on how “animal personalities” – inter-individual differences in animal behaviour – can drive the collective behaviour and functioning of animal groups such as schools of fish, including their cohesion, leadership, movement dynamics, and group performance. These research findings from the University of Konstanz, the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology and the University of Cambridge provide important new insights that could help explain and predict the emergence of complex collective behavioural patterns across social and ecological scales, with implications for conservation and fisheries and potentially creating bio-inspired robot swarms. It may even help us understand human society and team performance. The study is published in the 7 September 2017 issue of Current Biology.

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