Fritz Francisco                  

Research

My research sits at the intersection of behavioural ecology, collective intelligence, and computational biology. I develop and apply quantitative methods, spanning multi-camera tracking, computer vision, and statistical modelling, to study how individuals navigate social environments and how individual-level variation shapes collective outcomes. My empirical work spans laboratory and field settings, with study systems ranging from clonal fish to coral reef communities.

Collective Behavior and Group Decision-Making

How do groups of animals make decisions, and what determines whether collective outcomes are adaptive? I study the mechanisms by which individuals integrate private and social information to produce coordinated group behavior, with a focus on the role of individual heterogeneity and timing.

  1. Kao, A. B., Banerjee, S. C., Francisco, F. A., & Berdahl, A. M. "Timing decisions as the next frontier for collective intelligence"

    Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2024), 39(10): 904–912, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2024.06.003

  2. Banerjee, S. C., Francisco, F. A., & Kao, A. B. "Cognitive simplicity drives collective route improvements in homing pigeons"

    eLife (2026), 14: RP108054, doi: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.108054.3

  3. Rodriguez-Santiago, M., Nührenberg, P., Derry, J., Deussen, O., Francisco, F. A., Garrison, L. K., Garza, S. F., Hofmann, H. A., & Jordan, A. "Behavioral traits that define social dominance are the same that reduce social influence in a consensus task"

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), 117(31): 18566–18573, doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2000158117

  4. Bierbach, D., Lukas, J., Gómez-Nava, L., Francisco, F. A., Arias-Rodriguez, L., Krause, S., Pacher, K., Sevinchan, Y., Romanczuk, P., & Krause, J. "Collective escape waves provide a generic defence against different avian predators"

    Royal Society Open Science (2025), 12(3): 241055, doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241055

  5. Bartashevich, P., Francisco, F. A., Escurra-Alegre, A., Schäfer, F., Wuertz, S., Krause, J., Kloas, W., & Bierbach, D. "Air-Breathing Synchrony in Juvenile Arapaima Gigas Reveals Collective Coordination under Individual Physiological Constraints"

    Communications Biology (2026), 9(1): 831, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-026-10472-w

  6. Hansen, M. J., Bartashevich, P., Bideau, P., Francisco, F. A., James, D., Licht, M., Dhellemmes, F., Burns, A. L., Villalobos-Ortiz, H., Ortega-Garcia, S., Galván-Magaña, F., González-Armas, R., Elorriaga-Verplanken, F. R., & Krause, J. "The presence of mahi-mahi at multi-predator feeding aggregations modifies striped marlin attack behaviour"

    Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2026), 381(1961): 20250196, doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2025.0196

  7. Sampaio, E., Sridhar, V. H., Francisco, F. A., Nagy, M., Sacchi, A., Strandburg-Peshkin, A., Nührenberg, P., Rosa, R., Couzin, I. D., & Gingins, S. "Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups"

    Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024), 8(11): 2072–2084, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02525-2

Social Learning and Individual Behavioral Variation

How do individuals vary in their behavioral strategies, and how does this variation propagate through social networks? I use clonal fish as a model system to disentangle genetic from experiential sources of behavioral individuality, and to study how familiarity and prior experience modulate social learning.

  1. Francisco, F. A., Kesim, A. L., & Bierbach, D. "The Effect of Familiarity Among Social Partners on the Jumping Behavior of Amazon Mollies"

    Ethology (2026), doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/eth.70113

  2. Francisco, F. A., Stöcker, A., Lukas, J., Romanczuk, P., & Bierbach, D. "Experienced social partners hinder learning performance in naive clonal fish"

    bioRxiv (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.10.13.512085 — under review

  3. Ehlman, S. M., Scherer, U., Bierbach, D., Francisco, F. A., Laskowski, K. L., Krause, J., & Wolf, M. "Leveraging big data to uncover the eco-evolutionary factors shaping behavioural development"

    Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2023), 290(1992): 20222115, doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.2115

  4. Bierbach, D., Gómez-Nava, L., Francisco, F. A., Lukas, J., Musiolek, L., Hafner, V. V., Landgraf, T., Romanczuk, P., & Krause, J. "Live fish learn to anticipate the movement of a fish-like robot"

    Bioinspiration & Biomimetics (2022), 17(6): 065007, doi: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/ac8e3e

Cooperative Breeding and Social Systems in Coral Reef Fish

How are social hierarchies maintained, and what drives the evolution of cooperative breeding systems? My field research on clown anemonefish (Amphiprion percula) in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea, combines long-term behavioral observations with novel 3D tracking approaches to quantify individual roles, morphological change, and the consequences of environmental disturbance.

  1. Wakeham, M., Chau, O., Guo, A., Sirdeshmukh, R., Zhou, S., Truong, T., Lawrence, L., Zhang, A., Tio, V., Tirumala, J., Chandra, A., Francisco, F. A., Buston, P. M., Saenko, K., & Gong, B. "Who's Who in the Anemone? A Benchmark for Clownfish Tracking in the Wild"

    Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop, NeurIPS (2026)

  2. Bennett-Smith, M., Martorana, S., Yoon, J., Jacob, A., Francisco, F. A., Madraswalla, A., Thompson, K., Allard, C., & Buston, P. M. "Changes in the Anemone–Anemonefish Protection Mutualism Following Bleaching May Lead to Increased Fish Mortality"

    Science Advances — under review

  3. Majoris, J. E., Francisco, F. A., Burns, C. M., Brandl, S. J., Warkentin, K. M., & Buston, P. M. "Paternal care regulates the timing, synchrony and success of hatching in a coral reef fish"

    Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2022), 289(1982): 20221466, doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1466

  4. Majoris, J. E., Francisco, F. A., Atema, J., & Buston, P. M. "Reproduction, early development, and larval rearing strategies for two sponge-dwelling neon gobies, Elacatinus lori and E. colini"

    Aquaculture (2018), 483: 286–295

Quantitative Methods and Imaging Technology for Ecology

Answering ecological and behavioral questions at scale requires new tools. I develop open-source, low-cost frameworks for multi-camera animal tracking, 3D reconstruction, and automated behavioral quantification, with the goal of making high-resolution behavioral data collection accessible across laboratory and field settings.

  1. Francisco, F. A., Bennett-Smith, M., Albi, A., Walter, T., Koger, B., & Sridhar, V. "An Imaging Primer for Ecologists"

    under review (2026)

  2. Francisco, F. A., Becker, P. M., Sibal, R., Vizer, L., Romero, E., & Buston, P. M. "Amphitheater: A Flexible End-to-End Workflow for Quantifying Animal Morphology and Behavior in 3D"

    in preparation

  3. Francisco, F. A., Nührenberg, P., & Jordan, A. "High-resolution, non-invasive animal tracking and reconstruction of local environment in aquatic ecosystems"

    Movement Ecology (2020), 8: 27, doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-020-00214-w

  4. Bierbach, D., Francisco, F. A., Lukas, J., Landgraf, T., Maxeiner, M., Romanczuk, P., Musiolek, L., Hafner, V. V., & Krause, J. "Biomimetic robots promote the 3Rs Principle in animal testing"

    ALIFE 2021: The 2021 Conference on Artificial Life, MIT Press, doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00375