Model for clustering of living species

¹ Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal da Paraíba - 58051-970 João Pessoa, PB, Brazil
² Departamento de Física, Universidade Estadual de Maringá - 87020-900 Maringá, PR, Brazil

Received: 4 December 2019
Accepted: 31 January 2020

Abstract

Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in biological systems as in ants, bees, birds, fishes, gnus and rats, for instance. Here we describe a model composed of a set of female and male individuals that obeys simple rules that rapidly transform an uniform initial state into a single cluster that evolves in time as a stable dynamical structure. We show that the center of mass of the structure moves as a random walk, and that the size of the cluster engenders a power law behavior in terms of the number of individuals in the system. Moreover, we also examine other possibilities, in particular the case of two distinct species that can evolve to form one or two distinct clusters.