Stigmergy, collective actions and animal social spacing

Collective animal behavior studies have led the way in developing models that account for a large number of individuals, but have mostly considered situations where alignment and attraction play a key role, such as in schooling and flocking.
By quantifying how animals react to each others' presence, when interaction is via conspecific avoidance rather than alignment or attraction, we present a mechanistic insight that enables us to link individual behavior and space use patterns. As animals respond to both current and past positions of their neighbors, the assumption that the relative location of individuals is statistically and history-independent is not tenable, underscoring the limitations of traditional space use studies. We move beyond that assumption, by constructing a framework to analyze spatial segregation of mobile animals when neighbor proximity may elicit a retreat, and by linking conspecific encounter rate to history-dependent avoidance behavior. Our approach rests on the...