Physical Models of Animal motion

The phenomenon of collective motion is of wide interest and therefore a lot of scientific research has been done on that in the recent years. Especially in biological and social systems which seem to be far from equilibrium most of the time, coherent motion of groups of individuals can be observed very often. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, groups of ants, systems of microorganism like bacteria or cellular slime molds etc. show cooperative behavior and collective moving modes of a large group of these species. The types of motion lead from translational directed motion over rotational motions up to more complex cooperative moving patterns of particles. After an survey of existing biologically and physically motivated models the theory of Active Brownian particles is going to be introduced in more detail.