TY - JOUR T1 - Collective States, Multistability and Transitional Behavior in Schooling Fish A1 - Tunstrøm, Kolbjørn A1 - Katz, Yael A1 - Ioannou, Christos C. A1 - Huepe, Cristián A1 - Lutz, Matthew J. A1 - Couzin, Iain D. Y1 - 2013/02/28 N2 - Author Summary The patterns exhibited by moving animal groups like flocks of birds and schools of fish are typical of self-organizing systems in which global structural and dynamical properties arise from local interactions between individuals. Despite their apparent complexity, such systems can often be described, and understood, in terms of these emergent properties, rather than the detailed low-level description needed for depicting the individual dynamics. Here we show that schooling fish (in groups of 30 to 300 golden shiners) can be described in terms of the degree of alignment and degree of rotation among group members. We demonstrate that shiner schools exhibit three distinct behaviors: a swarm state with low speeds and little order; a strongly aligned state where the fish move with higher speeds; and a milling state, where each fish moves around the center of the group. Simulations have previously predicted this type of behavior, and we relate our findings to a well-known model of collective motion to help highlight similarities and differences between models and animal groups. Our results give insight into the regulation of group structure among animals, and also inform us generally about how global structures arise naturally from interactions among components of dynamical systems. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 9 IS - 2 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002915 SP - e1002915 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002915 ER -