Optoswim

I recently heard about Optoswim who are developing a system in which fish are encouraged to swim in a tank at certain speeds by following LED lights. Control of the swim speed can lead to control of the quality and health of the fish. The CEO is Sunil Kadri, who is also involved in Aquaculture Innovation.

It looks like Optoswim might have a lot of data which could be compared to agent based modelling.

References:
info from TSB
publication 1
publication 2
publication 3

Raptor "experiment"

There is evidence that birds form flocks to guard against predators (link, link) but other studies show no correlation (link, link).

It would be interesting to devise an experiment where a standard mathematical flocking model is used, with parameters such as flock size, flying speed, noise, and where a human user tries to catch birds of the flock using an interface such as a mouse/pointer directed model predator. The predator motion could be restricted to mimic a raptor, i.e. turning circle, acceleration, maximum speed.

Statistics of success rate (from the predator's point of view) versus parameters could then be measured.

This could all be automatic of course and driven by computer code, but the human interface gives an interesting way of engaging the public.

(One by product of such an experiment would be consideration of how different human subjects perform, with regard to age, gender etc).