Experimental validation of decision-driven mechanisms in natural collective systems

Determine, via experimental studies, whether biological multi-agent systems such as marine predators containing prey schools, killer whales feeding on schooling herring, chimpanzee packs defending territories, and ant colonies coordinating excavation actually employ decision-making mechanisms analogous to the shepherding control paradigm—specifically local target selection and goal-oriented trajectory planning that induce nonreciprocal, three-body couplings as modeled in the proposed continuum field theory.

Background

The paper introduces a nonreciprocal continuum field theory for shepherding, where herders use local decision-making—target selection (controlled by parameter γ) and goal-oriented trajectory planning (controlled by parameter δ)—to confine targets around a goal region. These decisions translate into space-dependent, task-oriented couplings (v1 and v2) that generate macroscopic, inhomogeneous states in the PDE description.

The authors suggest that similar decision-making processes may occur in natural biological systems (e.g., marine predators, killer whales, chimpanzees, ants). Verifying whether these systems actually use mechanisms analogous to the shepherding framework requires experimental validation, which they identify as an explicit open problem.