Boids of a Feather Flock Together - Evolving Prey Behaviours Under Different Predator Attack Strategies
Flocking and schooling are thought to have evolved partly as defences against predation, but how prey should balance social and escape tendencies may depend on the predator's hunting strategy. We extend the predator-prey boids model of Ojo et al. (2023), itself based on Reynolds' boids, by combining six prey movement tendencies (alignment, cohesion, separation, dodge, repel and wiggle) into a single weighted acceleration update, and by reformulating wiggle as a sinusoidal manoeuvre. We then use an evolutionary strategy to optimise the six behaviour coefficients for collective prey survival against four predator hunting strategies: attack-centroid, attack-nearest, attack-random and attack-...
| Authors | Augusta van Haren, Hanna Hoogen, Luca Pattavina |
|---|---|
| Primary category | q-bio.PE |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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