Mating swarm study offers new way to view flocks, schools, crowds

The adulthood of a midge fly is decidedly brief - about three days. But a new study of its mating swarm may yield lasting benefits for analyses of bird flocks, fish schools, human crowds and other forms of collective animal motion. "This is a field where there's been almost no quantitative data," said Nicholas T. Ouellette of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, principal investigator of the research , published Jan. 15 in the journal Scientific Reports. "What we've been able to do is put this in the laboratory, and that lets us take as much data as we want." The experiment - the first large-scale quantitative description of an insect swarm - is part of a larger effort to understand how local, spontaneous interaction among living things leads to the organization of complex, dynamic, but coherent systems. Most previous work on swarms has focused on descriptions of group behavior, such as the size of the swarm and how long it lasts. The methods employed in the new study allow for quantitative measurements of individual participating insects, allowing researchers to ask more detailed questions about swarm behavior.