Mechanisms of criticality in animal groups with long interaction ranges

Determine whether animal groups with long interaction ranges, such as starling flocks and swarming midges, undergo a jamming transition or whether their critical state is mediated by mechanisms distinct from jamming.

Background

Bees exhibit short nearest-neighbor distances and show jamming signatures consistent with the model, but other animal groups (e.g., flocks of starlings, swarms of midges) possess larger interaction ranges yet also display scale-free correlations and diverging correlation lengths.

The authors explicitly state that it remains to be discovered whether such systems experience jamming or whether their critical states arise via different mechanisms, highlighting a gap in the comparative understanding of criticality across taxa and interaction regimes.