Collective Motion as an Ultimate Effect in Crowded Selfish Herds.

ABSTRACT: The selfish herd hypothesis explains how social prey can assemble cohesive groups for maximising individual fitness. However, previous models often abstracted away the physical manifestation of the focal animals such that the influence of getting stuck in a crowded herd on individual adaptation was less intensively investigated. Here, we propose an evolutionary model to simulate the adaptation of egoistic social prey to predation given that individual mobility is strictly restrained by the presence of other conspecifics. In our simulated evolutionary races, agents were set to either be confined by neighbours or move to empty cells on the lattice, and the behavioural traits of those less exposed were selected and inherited. Our analyses show that under this crowded environment, cohesive and

SUBMITTER: Yang WC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6488663 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature