GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006

April 7, 12:00 p.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium (View Online)

Julia Parrish
University of Washington

"Perception versus reality: Lessons from flocks, schools, herds, and swarms"

Abstract: Animal groups are often cited as a conceptual model for engineered aggregations, just as individual animals are models for many common structures. Thus, the bird becomes the plane, the fish becomes the submarine. But is an ant swarm or a fish school an appropriate model for a distributed intelligence? Have biological systems solved the issues of information acquisition, interpretation, transfer, and storage in novel - and useful - ways? Are there fundamental rules of association within the biological realm, or is inter-individual interaction a species-specific phenomena? This talk will broadly survey what biologists (think they) know about the why's and how's of animal aggregation, focusing principally on fish schools.

Biography: Julia K Parrish is an Associate Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. For the past 20 years, Julia has studied fish schooling, in an effort to tease apart questions of cost:benefit of group membership, and the epiphenomena of group pattern arising from the decision-actions of individual members. She is the editor of the book Animal Aggregations in Three Dimensions (Cambridge 1997) as well as many articles on fish schooling in the peer-reviewed literature.


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