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Vishwesha Guttal |
Princeton University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology |
10:00 am in MAP 318
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Wide range of organisms, from bacteria to fish to birds, exhibit remarkable patterns of collective motion. Models based on statistical physics have revealed that local social interactions between individuals can produce spectacular spatiotemporal patterns. From an evolutionary perspective, individuals are typically in conflict with one another as they optimize their own relative-fitness. Therefore, a fundamental question in biology is to understand how the process of natural selection that favors selfish individuals shapes local interactions that in turn result in complex coordinated collective motion. In this talk, I will present our recent work that employs large-scale individual-based spatially-explicit evolutionary simulations to investigate the evolution of collective migration. I will also present results from a novel set-up that integrates computational framework of collective motion with real experiments, where we demonstrate that real predators strongly select for social interactions among simulated prey. |