Fish evacuate smoothly respecting a social bubble

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that neon fish evacuate through narrow passages smoothly without clogging by respecting social distances, contrasting with terrestrial animals, and behave like deformable bubbles during escape.

Contribution

It reveals that aquatic fish avoid clogging during evacuation by maintaining social distances, introducing a new perspective on collective movement in non-cognitive systems.

Findings

Fish do not clog at bottlenecks unlike terrestrial crowds.

Fish respect social distances and wait between exits.

Fish behave like deformable bubbles during evacuation.

Abstract

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. When forced to escape through a narrow opening, most terrestrial animals behave like granular materials and clogging events decrease the efficiency of the evacuation. 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. 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. The fish do not collide and wait for a minimum waiting time between two successive exits, while respecting a social distance. 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. We show that the current of escaping fish behaves like a set of deformable 2D-bubbles, their 2D domain, passing through a constriction. Schools of fish show that, by respecting social rules, a crowd of individuals can evacuate without clogging, even in an emergency situation.