Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE, 10(10), p. e0140558, 2015

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0140558

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Coordinated Behaviour in Pigeon Flocks

Journal article published in 2015 by Makoto Yomosa, Tsuyoshi Mizuguchi, Gábor Vásárhelyi ORCID, Máté Nagy ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We analysed pigeon flock flights using GPS trajectory data to reveal the most important kinematic aspects of flocking behaviour. We quantitatively investigated the internal motion of the flock based on pairwise statistics and found the following general relationships in all datasets: i) the temporal order of decisions characterised by the delay between directional changes is strictly related to the spatial order characterised by the longitudinal relative position within the flock; ii) during circling motion, pigeons use a mixture of two idealised and fundamentally different turning strategies, namely, parallel-path and equal-radius type turning. While pigeons tend to maintain their relative position within the flock on average, as in the parallel-path approximation, those who turn later also get behind as in the equal-radius case. Equal-radius type turning also tends to be expressed more during smaller radius turns.