Lecturer: Dr. Dan Gorbonos
Affiliation: Weizmann Institute of Science
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. We consider
mating swarms of midges, which are
thought to 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. Additionally, the
adaptive interactions open a new class of
equations of motion, which may appear in
other biological contexts.