Emergent dynamics of laboratory insect swarms
نویسندگان
چکیده
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.
منابع مشابه
Simulating Flying Insects Using Dynamics and Data-Driven Noise Modeling to Generate Diverse Collective Behaviors
We present a biologically plausible dynamics model to simulate swarms of flying insects. Our formulation, which is based on biological conclusions and experimental observations, is designed to simulate large insect swarms of varying densities. We use a force-based model that captures different interactions between the insects and the environment and computes collision-free trajectories for each...
متن کاملData-driven Noise Model for Simulating Swarms of Flying Insects
We present a model to generate noise-induced insect movements in a large swarm that are similar to those observed in real-world trajectories. Our approach is based on pre-recorded insect trajectories. After presenting a novel evaluation metric and a statistical validation approach that takes into account various characteristics insect motions, we evaluate well-known noise functions. Finally, we...
متن کاملBiologically-Inspired Visual Simulation of Insect Swarms
Representing the majority of living animals, insects are the most ubiquitous biological organisms on Earth. Being able to simulate insect swarms could enhance visual realism of various graphical applications. However, the very complex nature of insect behaviors makes its simulation a challenging computational problem. To address this, we present a general biologically-inspired framework for vis...
متن کاملTime-Frequency Analysis Reveals Pairwise Interactions in Insect Swarms.
The macroscopic emergent behavior of social animal groups is a classic example of dynamical self-organization, and is thought to arise from the local interactions between individuals. Determining these interactions from empirical data sets of real animal groups, however, is challenging. Using multicamera imaging and tracking, we studied the motion of individual flying midges in laboratory matin...
متن کاملDetermining asymptotically large population sizes in insect swarms.
Social animals commonly form aggregates that exhibit emergent collective behaviour, with group dynamics that are distinct from the behaviour of individuals. Simple models can qualitatively reproduce such behaviour, but only with large numbers of individuals. But how rapidly do the collective properties of animal aggregations in nature emerge with group size? Here, we study swarms of Chironomus ...
متن کامل