Join us on February 20th at 2 PM for "The Gravitational Theory of the Midges". This talk will be given by Dan Gorbonos, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
Brief Summary: The collective motion of animal groups emerges from the combined interactions between individual members. In many cases, such as with birds, fish, or ungulates, these interactions are mediated by sensory stimuli that predominantly originate from nearby neighbors. However, not all stimuli in animal groups are short-range. Here, we examine mating swarms of midges, which are thought to interact primarily through long-range acoustic stimuli. We leverage the similarity in form between the decay of acoustic and gravitational sources to develop a model for swarm behavior, finding structural similarities between swarms and star clusters.
