Research published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology used drone footage and trajectory modelling to infer how Tibetan antelopes coordinate while moving. Individuals reacted to directional changes by their nearest neighbours in less than a second, apparently using visually mediated local adjustments.
The interaction rules changed with herd size: larger groups showed weaker overall alignment, broader interaction ranges and longer coordination delays. The result is a useful model of a distributed system whose local communication topology adapts as the network scales.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-026-03773-x
