Miscellaneous
The fishermen of Iceland became concerned around a decade ago. The capelin, a small fish that’s a staple catch, and a crucial link in the ocean ecosystem, stopped migrating like they used to. To whom did they turn? A team of mathematicians. “So what I think about is particles but each particle gets to make decisions. And it makes decisions based on what the particles around it are doing," Dr. Alethea Barbaro said. Barbaro is a mathematician at Case Western Reserve University. "So I think about where a particle is, where it wants to go, then I move it there by multiplying it by some time step." She models the behavior of social organisms using an interacting particle model, where each particle represents one, or a group of, organisms. Her group found this works really well for predicting the movements of the capelin. “It's really, it's a dance between the math and the science. We actually were able to take out the homing instinct and recreate the migration without the homing instinct.