Animating Multiple Escape Maneuvers for a School of Fish

Abstract

A school of fish exhibit a variety of distinctive maneuvers to escape from predators. For example, they adopt avoid, compact, and inspection maneuvers when predators are nearby, use skitter or fast avoid maneuvers when predators chase them, or exhibit fountain, split, and flash maneuvers when predators attack them. Although these escape maneuvers have long been studied in biology and ecology, they have not been sufficiently modeled in computer graphics. Previous works on fish animation only provided simple escape behavior, lacking variety. The classic boids models do not include escape behavior. In this paper, we propose a behavioral model to simulate a variety of fish escape behavior in reaction to a single predator. Based on biological studies, our model can simulate common escape maneuvers such as compact, inspection, avoid, fountain, and flash. We demonstrate our results with simulations of predator attacks.