The impact of environmental noise on animal communication: pattern formation in a class of deterministic and stochastic hyperbolic models for self-organised biological aggregations

Abstract

The collective movement of animalsoccurs as a result of communicationВ between the members of the community. However, inter-individual communication can be aected by the stochasticity of the environment, leading toВ changes in the perception of neighbours and subsequent changes inВ  individualВ behaviour, which then in uence the overall behaviour of the animal aggregations. To investigate the eect of noise on the overall behaviour of animalВ aggregations, we consider a class of nonlocal stochastic and deterministic hyperbolic models for the collective movement of animals. We show numericallyВ that strong noise does not seem to in uence the spatio-temporal pattern (i.e.,В travelling aggregations) observed when all neighbours are perceived with the same intensity (i.e., the environment is homogeneous). However, when neighbours ahead/behind are perceived dierently by a reference individual, noiseВ can lead to the destruction of the spatio-temporal pattern. Moreover, weВ show that the increase in noise can lead to dierent transitions between different spatio-temporal patterns, and these transitions are relatively similarВ to the transitions between patterns when we perturb deterministically someВ parameters.