Collective Escape Behaviour in Springtails: Effects of Population Density on Movement Synchrony and Escape Response Dynamics

Abstract

This thesis studies how population density shapes collective escape behaviour in springtails, using high-quality slow-motion video recordings and manual individual tracking. Individual trajectories of springtails were annotated frame-by-frame and fed into a multi-metric computational pipeline covering pairwise speed synchrony, spatial autocorrelation, group polarisation, centre-of-mass displacement, and radial and tangential velocity decomposition.