Collective responses of flocking sheep (Ovis aries) to a herding dog (border collie)

Vivek Jadhav, Roberto Pasqua, Christophe Zanon, Matthieu Roy, Gilles Tredan, Richard Bon, Vishwesha Guttal, Guy Theraulaz · 2024

Read Collective responses of flocking sheep (Ovis aries) to a herding dog (border collie) by Vivek Jadhav, Roberto Pasqua, Christophe Zanon, Matthieu Roy, Gilles Tredan, Richard Bon, Vishwesha Guttal, Guy Theraulaz (2024) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11579353.txt.

Description

Vivek Jadhav and seven co-authors track how a flock of sheep answers a herding dog, in a 2024 study. Groups under attack move as one, but how word of danger travels inside the group is murky. The team tagged fourteen sheep and one border collie with precise radio trackers and filmed a driving task between two set points on a field.

A sheep's place along the flock's front-to-back line foretold how much sway it held over the group's path. Even though the dog pressed from behind, steering news on short timescales flowed from front to back. The dog, in turn, trimmed its own moves to the flock's shifts. A computer flock model matched these traits, and the front-to-back flow vanished when the chase was switched off.

Catalog record

CREATORVivek Jadhav, Roberto Pasqua, Christophe Zanon, Matthieu Roy, Gilles Tredan, Richard Bon, Vishwesha Guttal, Guy Theraulaz
YEAR2024
COLLECTIONPAPERS
FORMATTXT
FILE SIZE80 KB
VERSION1.0
LICENSECC BY 4.0
RIGHTSCC BY
SOURCEEurope PMC

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC11579353

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