Mark Bugden -- Animal Collectives in the hydrodynamic limit

The mathematical descriptions of flocks and swarms of animals usually employ agent-based models, where interaction rules between discrete neighbouring agents determine the evolution of the flock over time. An alternative and much-less studied approach considers instead a description of the flock in the continuum limit, where the role of individual agents is disregarded and the flock as a whole is considered a fluid. In this talk I will give an introduction to this description of collective behaviour, and discuss some of its interesting open questions. Since this talk will be on a very different topic to the usual content, it will be kept at an introductory level.