![]() The worst-case scenario is the escape through a narrow passage in life-or-death circumstances. ![]() With humans, for instance, crowd movements can lead to stampedes, causing dramatic consequences, including fatalities. This collective motion can be driven by a gregarious instinct to forage or mate or may be provoked by a panic situation. Schools of fish show that, by respecting social rules, a crowd of individuals can evacuate without clogging, even in an emergency situation.Ĭollective motion of animals is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in nature: common examples include flocks of birds, herds of animals, colonies of ants and schools of fish 1, 2. We show that the current of escaping fish behaves like a set of deformable 2D-bubbles, their 2D domain, passing through a constriction. When the constriction becomes similar to or smaller than their social distance, the individual domains defined by this cognitive distance are deformed and fish density increases. The fish do not collide and wait for a minimum waiting time between two successive exits, while respecting a social distance. Using a statistical analysis method developed for granular matter and applied to crowd evacuation, our results clearly show that, unlike crowds of people or herds of sheep, no clogging occurs at the bottleneck. Here, we explore the evacuation behavior of macroscopic, aquatic agents, neon fish, and challenge their gregarious behavior by forcing the school through a constricted passage. When forced to escape through a narrow opening, most terrestrial animals behave like granular materials and clogging events decrease the efficiency of the evacuation. Crowd movements are observed among different species and on different scales, from insects to mammals, as well as in non-cognitive systems, such as motile cells.
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