Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 57: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems IV (joint session BP/DY)
DY 57.8: Vortrag
Freitag, 13. März 2026, 11:45–12:00, BAR/SCHÖ
Adaptive self-organization in excitable biological collectives — •Bianca Ariani1,3, Yunus Sevinchan2,3, and Pawel Romanczuk2,3 — 1Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin — 2Science of Intelligence, TU Berlin — 3Institute for Theoretical Biology, HU Berlin
Biological collectives often display complex, context-dependent behavior, such as coordinated responses to predators, despite individuals following simple local rules. This class of phenomena is broadly understood as self-organization.
We examine a system showing rich spatio-temporal dynamics: Sulphur Mollies, Mexican freshwater fish whose group behavior resembles a stochastic excitable medium. To probe the mechanisms behind their collective activity, we study a bio-inspired agent-based model in which individuals estimate the shoal's mesoscale activity from the cues they perceive as they move. Each agent adjusts its sensitivity to cues through a simple homeostatic plasticity rule, allowing the group to regulate its collective state. This formulation links individual adaptation to population-level patterns.
Our results show that local adaptive regulation reproduces key qualitative features of the biological system. More generally, they illustrate how distributed plasticity mechanisms can support robust self-organization in complex biological collectives.
Keywords: collective behavior; self-organization; agent-based modeling