From scattered to focused: Task-dependent connectivity in honey bees, with midge swarms and bird flocks.

Abstract

Collective motion in biological swarms emerges from local interactions among individuals with limited sensing and cognition, offering valuable insights for decentralized engineered systems. This study presents a systematic framework for extracting interaction graphs from multiagent trajectory data. Three graph identification methods, sparse regression, Granger causality, and cross-correlation, together with geometric anisotropy analysis, are applied to experimental recordings of honey bees during scattered and focused return-to-hive behaviors, aggregations of midges, and flocking passerine jackdaws. Connectivity analysis reveals task-dependent interaction structures: scattered honey bees exhibit causal interactions with up to ten neighbors, whereas focused bees interact with only two to three agents, with midges showing slightly lower connectivity. Cross-correlation analysis indicated honey bees exhibit distance-sensitivity in close proximity, while flocking birds exhibit a distance-dependent correlation decline. These results highlight diverse coordination mechanisms relevant to bio-inspired networked systems.