Collective behaviour in large groups of animals

Istituto Sistemi Complessi and Dipartimento di Fisica

"Sapienza" Universita di Roma, Italy

In this talk, we will present our results on the study of collective behaviour in starling flocks and midge swarms. Starting from a description of our experiment we will explain how we analyse data. Moreover we will show that, despite the huge differences between flocking and swarming behaviour, they do exhibit common feature, which we interpret as the hallmark for collective behaviour.