Shoal movement in fish coordinates

A shoal of four mosquitofish is filmed while moving freely in a basin. In this video, all the frames are transformed to follow the movement of one of the fish (in red).
The color of the other fish reflects their distance from the focal fish: the fish marked in green is the nearest neighbour etc.
By looking at where the other fish of the shoal are when the fish in red speeds up, slows down, or turns to a particular direction we can learn what "rules of motion" fish follow when schooling together.

This is the kind of approach that we used in our paper "Inferring the rules of interaction of shoaling fish", by J.E. Herbert-Read, A. Perna, R.P. Mann, T.M. Schaerf, D.J.T. Sumpter and A.J.W. Ward published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA on 7th Nov. 2011

Reference to the original paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1109355108

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Education

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• fishT92
• trim48