Models for tuna school formation

Schooling behavior is a challenging topic in the context of animal aggregation. It is also of economic importance for the estimation and conservation of stock sizes. An individual based movement model will be developed, taking into account energetic advantages of schooling. This model is a cellular automaton with a hexagonal grid. The latter considers the geometry of a school, where fish swim in a diamond-shape configuration in order to take advantage of the velocity, induced by the tail strokes of preceding fish. Furthermore, knowing the induced velocity field makes it possible to consider the energetic needs of fish swimming in that school and to describe the break up of schools due to oxygen depletion. This allows us to estimate maximum school sizes.