Biology subjects

Bartashevich, P.

Publications and source records attributed to Bartashevich, P..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Perceptual constraints of motion shape animal movement strategies

As animals explore their environment, self-generated motion can affect visual perception, while perceptual constraints shape movement decisions. Movement strategies should therefore balance the benefits of exploration against the potential perceptual costs of motion. Here, we test whether the movement strategies animals adopt can enhance information acquisition while accounting for the constraints that motion imposes on visual perception. We first quantified the visual perceptual abilities of freely moving fish in three dimensions by projecting virtual prey around three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), determining how the likelihood of detecting prey varied across the fish's visual field as a function of their movement. Self-induced motion reduced the likelihood prey were detected, with increases in speed non-linearly reducing the perceptual abilities of the fish. Using agent-based simulations based on empirical models of visual perception, we demonstrate that when visual perception degrades non-linearly with speed, the strategy that maximizes prey detection is 'saltatory' locomotion, involving stationary pauses interspersed with movements. Moreover, experiments with freely swimming fish showed they adopted specific durations of stops and movements that improved prey detection given the way motion impacts their perception. Our results reveal that some movement strategies are more effective than others at gathering information during exploration.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Real-Time Human Interaction with Virtual Swarms in Shared Physical Space

Human-swarm interaction (HSI) explores how humans engage with distributed collective systems, aiming to incorporate human cognition into scalable and robust robotic swarms. While most HSI research focuses on remote teleoperation via engineered interfaces, real-world integration of swarms into everyday tasks requires natural, embodied interactions in shared physical spaces. To address the limitations of traditional teleoperation studies, and the high resource demands of using physical robot swarms for HSI research, we introduce CoBe XR, a spatial augmented reality system that projects virtual swarms into the physical environment of the human operator. CoBe XR enables real-time, fine-grained, natural interaction between humans and swarm-like agents through full-body movement without dedicated control interfaces or prior training. As a proof-of-concept, we present a behavioral study involving 40 participants who influenced swarm behavior solely through walking. Our results show that human participants were able to adapt to the collective dynamics of the swarm and control it through natural perception-motion control in a shared physical space. We argue that similar extended reality systems can not only reveal how humans perceive and adapt to collective dynamics, but they offer a general platform to understand human behavior or an intermediate solution to design embodied robot swarms.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Synchronization of the collective air-breathing behavior in juvenile Arapaima gigas

Animal collectives are capable of performing behaviors with high degrees of synchrony though their members might differ consistently and substantially in the focal behavior when alone. It is thus not entirely understood how these consistent differences in behavior at the individual level can be (socially) integrated into synchronized behaviors at the collective level. Here we show an unprecedented synchronized behavior in fish - the collective air-breathing of juvenile Arapaima gigas. Individuals of this obligate air-breathing fish from South America differed in their time between consecutive breaths when recorded alone in an aquaculture facility. However, when together in a shoal of about 200 same aged individuals, breathing is executed by a substantial portion of the shoal - within the same second. Our analysis of the individual and collective breathing patterns supported by stochastic individual-based simulations of inherently non-periodic coupled oscillators revealed that this degree of collective synchronization could be achieved by having some kind of assortative interaction rules where individuals respond towards one cluster/subgroup members stronger than to other cluster/subgroup members. By integrating this cluster synchrony rule we could successfully simulate highly synchronized collective behavior with varying proportions of otherwise diverse individuals taking part, matching our experimental observations and providing a mechanism to synchronize agents that differ consistently in the behavior in focus when in isolation.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2024

Collective anti-predator escape manoeuvres through optimal attack and avoidance strategies

The collective dynamics of self-organised systems emerge from the decision rules agents use to respond to each other and to external forces. This is evident in groups of animals under attack from predators, where understanding collective escape patterns requires evaluating the risks and rewards associated with particular social rules, prey escape behaviour, and predator attack strategies. Here, we find that the emergence of the fountain effect, a common collective pattern observed when animal groups evade predators, is the outcome of rules designed to maximise individual survival chances given predator hunting decisions. Using drone-based empirical observations of schooling sardine prey (Sardinops sagax caerulea) attacked by striped marlin (Kajikia audax), we first find the majority of attacks produce fountain effects, with the dynamics of these escapes dependent on the predators attack direction. Then, using a spatially-explicit agent-based model of predator-prey dynamics, we show that fountain manoeuvres can emerge from combining an optimal individual prey escape angle with social interactions. The escape rule appears to prioritise maximising the distance to the predator and creates conflict in the effectiveness of predators attacks and the preys avoidance, explaining the empirically observed predators attack strategies and the fountain evasions produced by prey. Overall, we identify the proximate and ultimate explanations for fountain effects and more generally highlight that the collective patterns of self-organised predatory-prey systems can be understood by considering both social escape rules and attack strategies.

ecology↗