Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2015
Department 1
Physics
Abstract
Animals of all sizes form groups, as acting together can convey advantages over acting alone; thus, collective animal behavior has been identified as a promising template for designing engineered systems. However, models and observations have focused predominantly on characterizing the overall group morphology, and often focus on highly ordered groups such as bird flocks. We instead study a disorganized aggregation (an insect mating swarm), and compare its natural fluctuations with the group-level response to an external stimulus. We quantify the swarm’s frequency-dependent linear response and its spectrum of intrinsic fluctuations, and show that the ratio of these two quantities has a simple scaling with frequency. Our results provide a new way of comparing models of collective behavior with experimental data.
Copyright Note
This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.118104
Recommended Citation
Ni, Rui, James G. Puckett, Eric R. Dufresne, Nicholas T. Ouellette. "Intrinsic Fluctuations and Driven Response of Insect Swarms." Physical Review Letters 115.11 (September 2015), 118104.
Required Publisher's Statement
Original version is available from the publisher, American Physical Society.