Collective motion due to individual escape and pursuit response

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that noncooperative behavior such as cannibalism may be a driving mechanism of collective motion. Motivated by these novel results we introduce a simple model of Brownian particles interacting by biologically motivated pursuit and escape interactions. We show the onset of collective motion for both interaction types and analyze their impact on the global dynamics. We demonstrate a strong dependence of experimentally accessible macroscopic observables on the relative strength of escape and pursuit and determine the scaling of the migration speed with model parameters.