title: The evolution of distributed sensing and collective computation in animal populations.
abstract: Many animal groups exhibit rapid, coordinated collective motion. Yet, the evolutionary forces that cause such collective responses to evolve are poorly understood. Here, we develop analytical methods and evolutionary simulations based on experimental data from schooling fish. We use these methods to investigate how populations evolve within unpredictable, time-varying resource environments. We show that populations evolve toward a distinctive regime in behavioral phenotype space, where small responses of individuals to local environmental cues cause spontaneous changes in the collective state of groups. These changes resemble phase transitions in physical systems. Through these transitions, individuals evolve the emergent capacity to sense and respond to resource gradients (i.e. individuals perceive gradients via social interactions, rather than sensing gradients directly), and to allocate themselves among distinct, distant resource patches. Our results yield new insight into how natural selection, acting on selfish individuals, results in the highly effective collective responses evident in nature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, United States.
authors.forename: Andrew M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Hein
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, United States.|Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Konstanz, Germany.
authors.forename: Sara Brin
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Rosenthal
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, United States.
authors.forename: George I
authors.initials: GI
authors.lastname: Hagstrom
authors.affiliation: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, United States.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Berdahl
authors.affiliation: Centre for Mathematics and the Environment, University of Exeter, Penryn, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Colin J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Torney
authors.affiliation: Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Konstanz, Germany.|Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
authors.forename: Iain D
authors.initials: ID
authors.lastname: Couzin
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005399:Fishes / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: Collective Behavior; Decision-making; Explore-exploit; Optimization; Physical Computation; Swarm; ecology; evolutionary biology; genomics; none