Self-organization and information transfer in Antarctic krill swarms
Antarctic krill swarms are one of the largest known animal aggregations, and yet, despite being the keystone species of the Southern Ocean, little is known about how swarms are formed and maintained. Understanding the local interactions between individuals that provide the basis for these swarms is...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://zenodo.org/record/5651389 https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8gtht76qj |
| Summary: | Antarctic krill swarms are one of the largest known animal aggregations, and yet, despite being the keystone species of the Southern Ocean, little is known about how swarms are formed and maintained. Understanding the local interactions between individuals that provide the basis for these swarms is fundamental to knowing how swarms arise in nature, and what potential factors might lead to their breakdown. Here we analyzed the trajectories of captive, wild-caught krill in 3D to determine individual level interaction rules and quantify patterns of information flow. Our results demonstrate that krill align with near neighbors and that they regulate both their direction and speed relative to the positions of groupmates. These results suggest social factors are vital to the formation and maintenance of swarms. Further, krill operate a novel form of collective organization, with measures of information flow and individual movement adjustments expressed most strongly in the vertical dimension, a finding not seen in other swarming species. This research represents a vital step in understanding the fundamentally important swarming behavior of krill. The data set contains coordinates in three dimensions (x,y,z) of mobile Antarctic krill. Funding provided by: ARCCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100017619Award Number: DP190100660 Study species Antarctic krill were collected by midwater trawl from the Southern Ocean during the 2016/17 Austral summer. The krill used in this study (average length ~40mm) were kept at the Australian Antarctic Division's marine research aquarium at Kingston, Tasmania, in an 1860L cylindrical tank (see 3). Filming and camera calibration Two Gopro™ Hero 6 cameras were used for filming krill within their home tanks at a rate of 30 frames per second for at least 30 minutes at a time. Cameras were fixed on an aluminium frame and submerged approximately 50cm beneath the surface of the water. The tanks were covered with white corflute for the duration of filming to minimize ... |
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