Tracking Schooling Fish in Three Dimensions: Experiments at the Rotterdam Zoo

This thesis describes methods and first analyses to study the shape and motion of a large school of approximately 2000 Harengula clupeola (false herring) in three-dimensional space. This school of fish was present at the large-scale and publicly accessible ocean aquarium of the Rotterdam zoo, in the Netherlands known as Diergaarde Blijdorp, from...

Multi-Agent Based Stochastic Dynamical Model to Measure Community Resilience

Emergency services and utilities need appropriate planning tools to analyze and improve infrastructure and community resilience to disasters. Recognized as a key metric of community resilience is the social well-being of a community during a disaster, which is made up of mental and physical social health. Other factors influencing community...

Stewardship of global collective behavior

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social...

The effects of chemical interactions and culture history on the colonization of structured habitats by competing bacterial populations

Background Bacterial habitats, such as soil and the gut, are structured at the micrometer scale. Important aspects of microbial life in such spatial ecosystems are migration and colonization. Here we explore the colonization of a structured ecosystem by two neutrally labeled strains of Escherichia coli. Using time-lapse microscopy we studied the...