TY - JOUR
T1 - On the tensile strength of insect swarms
AU - Ni, Rui
AU - Ouellette, Nicholas T.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd.
PY - 2016/8/25
Y1 - 2016/8/25
N2 - Collective animal groups are often described by the macroscopic patterns they form. Such global patterns, however, convey limited information about the nature of the aggregation as a whole. Here, we take a different approach, drawing on ideas from materials testing to probe the macroscopic mechanical properties of mating swarms of the non-biting midge Chironomus riparius. By manipulating ground-based visual features that tend to position the swarms in space, we apply an effective tensile load to the swarms, and show that we can quasi-statically pull single swarms apart into multiple daughter swarms. Our results suggest that swarms surprisingly have macroscopic mechanical properties similar to solids, including a finite Young's modulus and yield strength, and that they do not flow like viscous fluids.
AB - Collective animal groups are often described by the macroscopic patterns they form. Such global patterns, however, convey limited information about the nature of the aggregation as a whole. Here, we take a different approach, drawing on ideas from materials testing to probe the macroscopic mechanical properties of mating swarms of the non-biting midge Chironomus riparius. By manipulating ground-based visual features that tend to position the swarms in space, we apply an effective tensile load to the swarms, and show that we can quasi-statically pull single swarms apart into multiple daughter swarms. Our results suggest that swarms surprisingly have macroscopic mechanical properties similar to solids, including a finite Young's modulus and yield strength, and that they do not flow like viscous fluids.
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U2 - 10.1088/1478-3975/13/4/045002
DO - 10.1088/1478-3975/13/4/045002
M3 - Article
C2 - 27559838
AN - SCOPUS:84986005253
SN - 1478-3967
VL - 13
JO - Physical Biology
JF - Physical Biology
IS - 4
M1 - 045002
ER -