January 24, 2018
Dr. Bill Romey and his student C. Kemak had a primary research article appear this month. The journal, Animal Behaviour, published their article titled, "Is the quorum threshold for emergent group response in whirligigs absolute or proportional".
Their research shows that 10 percent of the animals in a swarm have to see a predator before the whole group increases their speed to evade it. This is of general interest in the field of animal behavior because in many species it is not clear if the number to trigger an alarm response is a fixed number, regardless of group size, or a fixed proportion. Their findings using whirligigs may apply to other animals such as fish in schools, birds in flocks, or even human crowd responses.
The full article can be found on Google advanced scholar by searching: Romey W.L. and Kemak, C.D..
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