Modeling Collective Animal Movement Through Interactions in Behavioral States

• Activity Number: 406 - Spatio-Temporal Methods in Ecology and Epidemiology
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 1, 2017 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): James Russell* and Ephraim M Hanks and David Hughes
• Companies: Muhlenberg College and The Pennsylvania State University and Penn State Univeristy
• Keywords: Behavioral States ; Collective Movement ; Correlated Random Walk ; Poecilia Reticulata ; Spatially-Varying Movement ; Animal Movement

Abstract

Animal movement often exhibits changing behavior since animals often alternate between exploring, resting, feeding, or other potential states. Changes in these behavioral states are often driven by environmental conditions or the behavior of nearby individuals. We propose a model for dependence between individual's behavioral states. We couple this state switching with complex animal movement models to model a large variety of animal movement types. To demonstrate this method of capturing dependence, we study the movements of ants in a nest. The behavioral interaction structure is combined with a spatially varying stochastic differential equation model to allow for spatially and temporally heterogeneous collective movement of all ants within the nest. Our results reveal behavioral tendencies that are related to nearby individuals, particularly the queen, and to different locations in the nest.