Emergent dynamics of laboratory insect swarms
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Kelley-2013-Emergent dynamics of.pdf
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842.99 KB
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Author(s)
Kelley, Douglas H.
Ouellette, Nicholas T.
Date Issued
January 2013
Journal
Scientific Reports
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Kelley, Douglas H., and Nicholas T. Ouellette. “Emergent Dynamics of Laboratory Insect Swarms.” Sci. Rep. 3 (January 15, 2013).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Collective animal behaviour occurs at nearly every biological size scale, from single-celled organisms to the largest animals on earth. It has long been known that models with simple interaction rules can reproduce qualitative features of this complex behaviour. But determining whether these models accurately capture the biology requires data from real animals, which has historically been difficult to obtain. Here, we report three-dimensional, time-resolved measurements of the positions, velocities, and accelerations of individual insects in laboratory swarms of the midge Chironomus riparius. Even though the swarms do not show an overall polarisation, we find statistical evidence for local clusters of correlated motion. We also show that the swarms display an effective large-scale potential that keeps individuals bound together, and we characterize the shape of this potential. Our results provide quantitative data against which the emergent characteristics of animal aggregation models can be benchmarked.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01073
