Alpaca Herd Guard Lab — 2D Sentinel & Predator Response

This 2D companion strips the herd scene down to an overhead view of the same sentinel behavior driving the 3D version: a subset of adult alpacas rotates onto watch duty at evenly spaced points around the paddock rim, holding still while the rest of the herd grazes near individual home patches with a gentle pull toward the group centroid. When a predator approaches from outside the fence and comes within a sentinel's vision radius, an alert fires — crias immediately peel off toward the herd centre while nearby adults converge on the predator's position. If enough adults close in (a threshold that gets easier to reach as the herd cohesion slider rises), the predator is mobbed and flees; if it reaches deep into the paddock before that happens, it slips through before eventually retreating. A live readout panel tracks cumulative alerts, a density figure derived from how tightly the herd is currently spread, and a measured cohesion percentage — the same signals the 3D version exposes, but readable at a glance without orbiting a camera.