Complexity Research in Animal Behaviour

Satellite @ CCS 2025 - Siena, 3 Sept 2025 - Room 20

Animal groups can be considered as complex systems of interacting entities (the individuals). The collective behaviour of animal groups is an emergent outcome of the traits of individuals within the group and their social interactions. The group- and population-level structures and dynamics that result have profound implications for key ecological (e.g., infectious disease transmission) and evolutionary processes, meaning that they are of great fundamental and applied interest.

While massive steps forward have happened in applying complex systems approaches —such as social network analysis— to study animal behaviour, there remains limited exchange between the research fields. Not only could more interdisciplinary work contribute greatly to answering exciting ecological and evolutionary questions,  the datasets now available from non-human animals offer great potential to test key theoretical ideas in complex systems research. Therefore, we are very happy to announce the second edition of Complexity Research in Animal Behaviour (CRAB): a cross-disciplinary satellite meeting to encourage greater exchange between these fields within the Conference on Complex Systems. Clashing these two worlds can lead to novel scientific developments because the animal behaviour field, with its massive potential as a source of exciting new datasets, can test key conceptual ideas in complexity science, and because the theory and methods that are continuously developed in the wider field of complex systems can be highly useful for understanding animal systems.