Long-range Acoustic Interactions in Insect Swarms: An Adaptive Gravity Model

Abstract

The collective motion of groups of animals emerges from the net effect of the interactions between individual members of the group. In many cases, such as birds, fish, or ungulates, these interactions are mediated by sensory stimuli that predominantly arise from nearby neighbors. But not all stimuli in animal groups are short range. Here, we consider mating swarms of midges, which interact primarily via long-range acoustic stimuli. We exploit the similarity in form between the decay of acoustic and gravitational sources to build a model for swarm behavior. By accounting for the adaptive nature of the midges' acoustic sensing, we show that our "adaptive gravity" model makes mean-field predictions that agree well with experimental observations of laboratory swarms. Our results highlight the role of sensory mechanisms and interaction range in collective animal behavior. The adaptive interactions that we present here open a new class of equations of motion, which may appear in other biological contexts.

25 pages, 15 figures

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• Stable Swarming Using Adaptive Long-range Interactions
• Similarities between Insect Swarms and Isothermal Globular Clusters
• Mean field theory of chaotic insect swarms
• Emergent clustering due to quorum sensing interactions in active matter
• Acoustic signaling enables collective perception and control in active matter systems
• Active Matter Flocking via Predictive Alignment
• Power laws of natural swarms are fingerprints of an extended critical region
• Scale-free chaos in the 2D harmonically confined Vicsek model
• Distributed Alignment Processes with Samples of Group Average
• A Field-Theoretic Model for Chemotaxis in Run and Tumble Particles
• Analysis of aligning active local searchers orbiting around their common home position
• Models of Animal Behavior as Active Particle Systems with Nonreciprocal Interactions
• The Inertial Spin Model of flocking with position-dependent forces