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Why animals swirl and how they group

We report a possible solution for the long-standing problem of the biological function of swirling motion, when a group of animals orbits a common center of the group. We exploit the hypothesis that learning processes in the nervous system of animals may be modelled by reinforcement learning (RL) an...

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Autores principales: Nuzhin, Egor E., Panov, Maxim E., Brilliantov, Nikolai V.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8531037/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34675352
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99982-7
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author Nuzhin, Egor E.
Panov, Maxim E.
Brilliantov, Nikolai V.
author_facet Nuzhin, Egor E.
Panov, Maxim E.
Brilliantov, Nikolai V.
author_sort Nuzhin, Egor E.
collection PubMed
description We report a possible solution for the long-standing problem of the biological function of swirling motion, when a group of animals orbits a common center of the group. We exploit the hypothesis that learning processes in the nervous system of animals may be modelled by reinforcement learning (RL) and apply it to explain the phenomenon. In contrast to hardly justified models of physical interactions between animals, we propose a small set of rules to be learned by the agents, which results in swirling. The rules are extremely simple and thus applicable to animals with very limited level of information processing. We demonstrate that swirling may be understood in terms of the escort behavior, when an individual animal tries to reside within a certain distance from the swarm center. Moreover, we reveal the biological function of swirling motion: a trained for swirling swarm is by orders of magnitude more resistant to external perturbations, than an untrained one. Using our approach we analyze another class of a coordinated motion of animals—a group locomotion in viscous fluid. On a model example we demonstrate that RL provides an optimal disposition of coherently moving animals with a minimal dissipation of energy.
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spelling pubmed-85310372021-10-22 Why animals swirl and how they group Nuzhin, Egor E. Panov, Maxim E. Brilliantov, Nikolai V. Sci Rep Article We report a possible solution for the long-standing problem of the biological function of swirling motion, when a group of animals orbits a common center of the group. We exploit the hypothesis that learning processes in the nervous system of animals may be modelled by reinforcement learning (RL) and apply it to explain the phenomenon. In contrast to hardly justified models of physical interactions between animals, we propose a small set of rules to be learned by the agents, which results in swirling. The rules are extremely simple and thus applicable to animals with very limited level of information processing. We demonstrate that swirling may be understood in terms of the escort behavior, when an individual animal tries to reside within a certain distance from the swarm center. Moreover, we reveal the biological function of swirling motion: a trained for swirling swarm is by orders of magnitude more resistant to external perturbations, than an untrained one. Using our approach we analyze another class of a coordinated motion of animals—a group locomotion in viscous fluid. On a model example we demonstrate that RL provides an optimal disposition of coherently moving animals with a minimal dissipation of energy. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-10-21 /pmc/articles/PMC8531037/ /pubmed/34675352 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99982-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Nuzhin, Egor E.
Panov, Maxim E.
Brilliantov, Nikolai V.
Why animals swirl and how they group
title Why animals swirl and how they group
title_full Why animals swirl and how they group
title_fullStr Why animals swirl and how they group
title_full_unstemmed Why animals swirl and how they group
title_short Why animals swirl and how they group
title_sort why animals swirl and how they group
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8531037/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34675352
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99982-7
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