collectives at Konstanz

It's been a while since I last covered Iain Couzin's amazing work on collective behaviour (in humans and other animals) so it was great to catch up with all these things for a new feature. Since the last one, Iain has moved to the lovely city of Konstanz on the shores of the eponymous lake. Which is on my shortlist of places to move to when Brexit actually happens. Iain went there to lead a Max Planck department, out of which a new institute of ethology has now been born, which is a bit ironic, as the Max Planck society earlier abandoned the ethology tag to turn the institute founded by Konrad Lorenz into one for ornithology.

Anyhow, there are so many exciting things going on at Konstanz (I really should move there!) that I basically did a feature rounding up examples of the work from the three departments of the new institute, studying the collective behaviour of fishes, baboons, and storks. Oh, and then I threw in some humans, too:



Reading the hive mind

Current Biology Volume 29, issue 20, pages R1055-R1058, October 21, 2019


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A recent example of collective behaviour in humans (Fridays for future, Düsseldorf, Sept 2019). I'm wondering, by the way, when collective biologists have conferences, do they go all meta and analyse the collective behaviour of their colleagues?