© QuarkfolioInspired by recent research on locust swarms, scientists have used Brownian motion to model how individuals form swarms through escape and pursuit interactions.
The phenomenon, called collective motion, is common in nature, exhibited by groups that fly, run, and swim, such as swarms of insects and colonies of bacteria. In collective motion, groups move together to form patterns as an organized (but not necessarily cooperative) single body. Scientists aren't sure exactly what mechanisms cause the emergence of collective motion. However, the natural phenomenon has attracted the interest of researchers in diverse fields such as physics and computer science.
In a recent study, researchers have modeled collective motion using Brownian particles, and they observed as individual particles interact via escape and pursuit movements. Motivated by a previous study that observed cannibalistic interactions in locust and cricket swarms, the scientists found that both escape and pursuit movements can cause collective motion, but escape movements dominated the particular case of insect swarming. Pawel Romanczuk and Lutz Schimansky-Geier of Humboldt University Berlin, and Iain D. Couzin of Princeton University, have published their study in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
