
Guy TheraulazFrench National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale
Guy Theraulaz
Ph.D. in Neurosciences and Ethology
I am a senior research fellow at the CNRS and I am studying collective animal behavior
About
299
Publications
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Introduction
I am a Research Director at CNRS. I am primarily studying collective behavior, swarm and collective intelligence. Swarm intelligence refers to the ability of social insects and some other group living species to collectively solve specific problems effectively and to provide adaptive responses to changing environments. My research focuses on the understanding of a broad spectrum of collective behavior in animal societies and human crowds.
Additional affiliations
Education
September 1983 - June 1991
Aix-Marseille Université
Field of study
- Neurosciences and Ethology
Publications
Publications (299)
Escape waves in animal groups, such as bird flocks and fish schools, have attracted a lot of attention, as they provide the opportunity to better understand how information can efficiently propagate in moving groups, and how individuals can coordinate their actions under the threat of predators. There is a lack of appropriate experimental protocols...
Group-living organisms commonly exhibit collective escape responses, yet how information flows among group members in these events remains an open question. Here, we study the collective responses of a sheep flock (Ovis aries) to a shepherd dog (border collie) in a driving task between two well-defined target points. We collected high-resolution sp...
Investigating the thermoregulation and ventilation processes in termite mound holds great interest, in particular for its potential implications in advancing eco-friendly building designs. In this article we discuss major results on these processes in termite mounds of varying sizes and ventilation types. Additionally, we propose the integration of...
Biohybrid systems in which robotic lures interact with animals have become compelling tools for probing and identifying the mechanisms underlying collective animal behavior. One key challenge lies in the transfer of social interaction models from simulations to reality, using robotics to validate the modeling hypotheses. This challenge arises in br...
Intermittent and asynchronous burst-and-coast swimming is widely adopted by various species of fish as an energy-efficient locomotion mode. This swimming mode significantly influences the way in which fish integrate information and make decisions in a social context. Here, we introduce a simplified fish school model in which individuals have an asy...
Across taxa, group-living organisms exhibit collective escape responses to stimuli varying from mild stress to predatory pressures. How exactly does information flow among group members leading to a collective escape remains an open question. Here we study the collective responses of a flock of sheep to a shepherd dog in a driving task between well...
Modern computing has enhanced our understanding of how social interactions shape collective behaviour in animal societies. Although analytical models dominate in studying collective behaviour, this study introduces a deep learning model to assess social interactions in the fish species Hemigrammus rhodostomus. We compare the results of our deep lea...
Schooling fish heavily rely on visual cues to interact with neighbors and avoid obstacles. The availability of sensory information is influenced by environmental conditions and changes in the physical environment that can alter the sensory environment of the fish, which in turn affects individual and group movements. In this study, we combine exper...
Stigmergy is a generic coordination mechanism widely used by animal societies, in which traces left by individuals in a medium guide and stimulate their subsequent actions. In humans, new forms of stigmergic processes have emerged through the development of online services that extensively use the digital traces left by their users. Here, we combin...
Biohybrid systems in which robotic lures interact with animals have become compelling tools for probing and identifying the mechanisms underlying collective animal behavior. One key challenge lies in the transfer of social interaction models from simulations to reality, using robotics to validate the modeling hypotheses. This challenge arises in br...
The collective behavior of animals has been traditionally studied through observation, quantitative models of behavior, and devices of low intelligence. Nowadays, the advancements in the field of robotics allow for closed-loop experiments that occur in real-time, and for artificial agents that intelligently and autonomously blend into hybrid groups...
Coarse-grained descriptions of collective motion of flocking systems are often derived for the macroscopic or the thermodynamic limit. However, the size of many real flocks falls within ‘mesoscopic’ scales (10 to 100 individuals), where stochasticity arising from the finite flock sizes is important. Previous studies on mesoscopic models have typica...
Stigmergy is a generic coordination mechanism widely used by animal societies, in which traces left by individuals in a medium guide and stimulate their subsequent actions. In humans, new forms of stigmergic processes have emerged through the development of online services that extensively use the digital traces left by their users. Here we combine...
Schooling fish heavily rely on visual cues to interact with neighbors and avoid obstacles. The availability of sensory information is influenced by environmental conditions and changes in the physical environment that can alter the sensory environment of the fish, which in turn affects individual and group movements. In this study, we combine exper...
Coarse-grained descriptions of collective motion of flocking systems are often derived for the macroscopic or the thermodynamic limit. However, many real flocks are small sized (10 to 100 individuals), called the mesoscopic scales, where stochasticity arising from the finite flock sizes is important. Developing mesoscopic scale equations, typically...
Deciphering the social interactions that govern collective behavior in animal societies has greatly benefited from advancements in modern computing. Computational models diverge into two kinds of approaches: analytical models and machine learning models. This work introduces a deep learning model for social interactions in the fish species Hemigram...
This paper introduces a novel bio-inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, named termite life cycle optimizer (TLCO), which is based both on the life cycle of a termite colony and the modulation of movement strategies used by many animal species in nature. Termite colonies are comprised of three distinct castes: the workers, the soldiers and...
In moving animal groups, social interactions play a key role in the ability of individuals to achieve coordinated motion. However, a large number of environmental and cognitive factors are able to modulate the expression of these interactions and the characteristics of the collective movements that result from these interactions. Here, we use a dat...
Lymphocytes have been described to perform different motility patterns such as Brownian random walks, persistent random walks, and Lévy walks. Depending on the conditions, such as confinement or the distribution of target cells, either Brownian or Lévy walks lead to more efficient interaction with the targets. The diversity of these motility patter...
In moving animal groups, social interactions play a key role in the ability of individuals to achieve coordinated motion. However, a large number of environmental and cognitive factors are able to modulate the expression of these interactions and the characteristics of the collective movements that result from these interactions. Here, we use a dat...
Swarm robotics deals with the design, construction, and deployment of large groups of robots that coordinate and cooperatively solve a problem or perform a task. It takes inspiration from natural self-organizing systems, such as social insects, fish schools, or bird flocks, characterized by emergent collective behavior based on simple local interac...
Lymphocytes have been described to perform different motility patterns such as Brownian random walks, persistent random walks, and Lévy walks. Depending on the conditions, such as confinement or the distribution of target cells, either Brownian or Lévy walks lead to more efficient interaction with the targets. The diversity of these motility patter...
Significance
Termite nests are a remarkable example of functional self-organization that show how structure and function emerge on multiple length and time scales in ecophysiology. To understand the process by which this arises, we document the labyrinthine architecture within the subterranean nests of the African termite Apicotermes lamani and dev...
Swarm robotics will tackle real-world applications by leveraging automatic design, heterogeneity, and hierarchical self-organization.
A major problem resulting from the massive use of social media is the potential spread of incorrect information. Yet, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions. We performed experiments in which participants had to estimate a series of quantities, before and after receiving social...
In our digital societies, individuals massively interact through digital interfaces whose impact on collective dynamics can be important. In particular, the combination of social media filters and recommender systems can lead to the emergence of polarized and fragmented groups. In some social contexts, such segregation processes of human groups hav...
Group-living organisms that collectively migrate range from cells and bacteria to human crowds, and include swarms of insects, schools of fish, and flocks of birds or ungulates. Unveiling the behavioural and cognitive mechanisms by which these groups coordinate their movements is a challenging task. These mechanisms take place at the individual sca...
Collective migration has become a paradigm for emergent behaviour in systems of moving and interacting individual units resulting in coherent motion. In biology, these units are cells or organisms. Collective cell migration is important in embryonic development, where it underlies tissue and organ formation, as well as pathological processes, such...
Coordinated motion and collective decision-making in fish schools result from complex interactions by which individuals integrate information about the behavior of their neighbors. However, little is known about how individuals integrate this information to take decisions and control their motion. Here, we combine experiments with computational and...
A major problem that results from the massive use of social media networks is the possible spread of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions. We performed experiments in which participants had to estimate a series of quantities before and after rec...
We develop an experimental method to induce controlled and local perturbations in a group of fish. Using the paradigm of the shuttle box we condition aversive escape reactions in groups of rummy-nose tetra ( Hemigrammus rhodostomus ) in response to a green light. Our experiments suggest that aversive conditioning can (i) be used successfully in thi...
Social media filters combined with recommender systems can lead to the emergence of filter bubbles and polarized groups. In addition, segregation processes of human groups in certain social contexts have been shown to share some similarities with phase separation phenomena in physics. Here, we study the impact of information filtering on collective...
Group-living organisms that collectively migrate range from cells and bacteria to human crowds, and include swarms of insects, schools of fish and flocks of birds or ungulates. Unveiling the behavioural and cognitive mechanisms by which these groups coordinate their movements is a challenging task. These mechanisms take place at the individual scal...
Coordinated motion and collective decision-making in fish schools result from complex interactions by which individuals integrate information about the behavior of their neighbors. However, little is known about how individuals integrate this information to take decisions and control their movements. Here, we combine experiments with computational...
Jacques Gervet died on December 5th, 2018 at the age
of 84. His research activity began in 1954 at the “Laboratoire
d’Évolution des Êtres Organisés” in Paris chaired by
Pierre-Paul Grassé. Then, in the early 1960s, he moved to
Marseille when the Institute of Neurophysiology and Psychophysiology
was founded and joined the Department of
Animal Behavi...
Termite nests have been widely studied as effective examples for ventilation and thermoregulation. However, the mechanisms by which these properties are controlled by the microstructure of the outer walls remain unclear. Here, we combine multiscale X-ray imaging with three-dimensional flow field simulations to investigate the impact of the architec...
It is generally accepted that, when moving in groups, animals process information to coordinate their motion. Recent studies have begun to apply rigorous methods based on Information Theory to quantify such distributed computation. Following this perspective, we use transfer entropy to quantify dynamic information flows locally in space and time ac...
Understanding and predicting the collective behaviour of crowds is essential to improve the efficiency of pedestrian flows in urban areas and minimize the risks of accidents at mass events. We advocate for the development of crowd traffic management systems, whereby observations of crowds can be coupled to fast and reliable models to produce rapid...
Built structures, such as animal nests or buildings that humans occupy, serve two overarching purposes: shelter and a space where individuals interact. The former has dominated much of the discussion in the literature. But, as the study of collective behaviour expands, it is time to elucidate the role of the built environment in shaping collective...
Moving animal groups such as schools of fishes or flocks of birds often undergo sudden collective changes of their travelling direction as a consequence of stochastic fluctuations in heading of the individuals. However, the mechanisms by which these behavioural fluctuations arise at the individual level and propagate within a group are still unclea...
Lymphocytes alternate between phases of individual migration across tissues and phases of clustering during activation and function. The range of lymphocyte motility behaviors and the identity of the factors that govern them remain elusive. To explore this point, we here collected unprecedented statistics pertaining to cell displacements, cell:matr...
The development of tracking methods for automatically quantifying individual behavior and social interactions in animal groups has open up new perspectives for building quantitative and predictive models of collective behavior. In this work, we combine extensive data analyses with a modeling approach to measure, disentangle, and reconstruct the act...
Leader change.
This video illustrates an exchange (at 20 s) of geometrical leader and follower in a typical run of the model with two fish in a circular tank of radius 250 mm. Note that the large angle change of the red fish at 20 s is probably due to the rejection procedure detailed in the main text, sometimes leading to such a large spontaneous r...
One fish trajectories.
Left: A typical experiment with 1 fish swimming in a circular tank of radius 250 mm. Right: 3D representation of the tracking and analysis output. The successive positions of the fish are represented by spheres whose color depends on its current speed (maximum and minimum speeds are shown in red and light blue respectively)....
Experiment vs model—one fish.
Comparison of the dynamics of a single fish in an experiment (left) and in a typical run of the model (right; starting from approximately the same location as in the experiment), in a circular tank of radius 250 mm. The animated fish size is not strictly proportional to its actual dimensions, but used to facilitate vis...
Experiment vs model—two fish.
Comparison of the dynamics of groups of two fish in an experiment (left) and in a typical run of the model (right), in a circular tank of radius 250 mm (see also the legend of S1 Video for details). On the short 40 s time scale of both videos, fish display a greater variety of behaviors than for one fish experiments/si...
List of experiments.
(PDF)
Two fish trajectories.
Left: A typical experiment with 2 fish swimming in a circular tank of radius 250 mm. Right: 3D representation of the tracking and analysis output. The successive positions of fish are represented by spheres whose color depends on their current speed (maximum and minimum speeds are shown in red and light blue respectively). Th...
Schools of fish and flocks of birds can move together in synchrony and decide on new directions of movement in a seamless way. This is possible because group members constantly share directional information with their neighbors. Although detecting the directionality of other group members is known to be important to maintain cohesion, it is not cle...
Sample video of an U-turn dynamic in a group of 5 fish.
Video showing the velocities of fish and interaction dynamics in the group, corresponding to Fig 4 and S1 Video.
(AVI)
Directional correlation Hij(t, τ) between fish Fi and Fj.
For i = 2, …, 5 (rows) and j = 1, …, 5, j ≠ i (columns), e.g., first row is for fish F2: (A) H21(t, τ), (B) H23(t, τ), (C) H24(t, τ) and (D) H25(t, τ).
(TIF)
Distribution of the average duration (in seconds) of (A) individual and (B) collective U-turns in groups of 2 fish.
Collective U-turns last around twice the duration of individual U-turns.
(TIF)
Distribution of the average duration (in seconds) of (A) individual and (B) collective U-turns in groups of 5 fish.
Collective U-turns last almost four times the duration of individual U-turns.
(TIF)
Parameter comparison matrix.
Matrix of 40 × 40 square cells, where each cell corresponds to the similarity value SV arising from the comparison of the two parameter combinations shown in the corresponding horizontal and vertical axes. We considered 40 parameter combinations, thus the size of the matrix. The similarity value SV is represented by the...
Available data for different values of the average directional correlation threshold Cmin, in the case of N = 5 fish.
Small panels: (there are 10, one per experiment) Number of data points available from the respective experiment for each value of Cmin in [0.5, 1]. The values of Cmin are denoted by small circles. Three specific values are shown by...
Collective U-turns observed in experiments with N = 5 fish.
(TIF)
Artificial collective U-turns obtained with the null model.
(TIF)
Sample video of an U-turn event in a group of 5 fish.
Original video of an U-turn event, corresponding to Fig 4 and S2 Video.
(AVI)