Fish evacuate smoothly respecting a social bubble.

Crowd movements are observed among different species and on different scales, from insects to mammals, as well as in non-cognitive systems, such as motile cells. When forced to escape through a narrow opening, most terrestrial animals behave like granular materials and clogging events decrease the efficiency of the evacuation. Here, we explore the evacuation behavior of macroscopic, aquatic agents, neon fish, and challenge their gregarious behavior by forcing the school through a constricted passage. Using a statistical analysis method developed for granular matter and applied to crowd evacuation, our results clearly show that, unlike crowds of people or herds of sheep, no clogging occurs at the bottleneck. The fish do not collide and wait for a minimum waiting time between two successive exits, while respecting a social distance. When the constriction becomes similar to or smaller than their social distance, the individual domains defined by this cognitive distance are deformed and fish density increases. We show that the current of escaping fish behaves like a set of deformable 2D-bubbles, their 2D domain, passing through a constriction. Schools of fish show that, by respecting social rules, a crowd of individuals can evacuate without clogging, even in an emergency situation.

Collective orientation of an immobile fish school and effect on rheotaxis.

We study the orientational order of an immobile fish school. Starting from the second Newton law, we show that the inertial dynamics of orientations is ruled by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. This process describes the dynamics of alignment between neighboring fish in a shoal-a dynamics already used in the literature for mobile fish schools. First, in a fluid at rest, we calculate the global polarization (i.e., the mean orientation of the fish), which decreases rapidly as a function of noise. We show that the faster a fish is able to reorient itself the more the school can afford to reorder itself for important noise values. Second, in the presence of a stream, each fish tends to orient itself and swims against the flow: so-called rheotaxis. So, even in the presence of a flow, it results in an immobile fish school. By adding an individual rheotaxis effect to alignment interaction between fish, we show that in a noisy environment individual rheotaxis is enhanced by alignment interactions between fish.