#swarms

Day 4: Your special interest

Biology 💖💞💕💖💞

04.17.26

Had a swarm removal from a water main. It was on a hilltop and during a very windy day, but it was easy to locate and secure the queen, and the bees just went marching in!

A study recently published in Science has found that classical models of collective behavior fail to explain the mechanisms driving desert locust swarms—an ecological phenomenon that affects millions of lives worldwide. This research offers a new perspective on the cognitive and sensory mechanisms that underpin collective motion, challenging long-held beliefs in the field of animal behavior. Desert locusts, a notorious Biblical pest, form some of the largest insect groups in nature and are estimated to threaten the livelihood of one in ten people due to their impact on food security. Swarms begin when flightless juveniles aggregate and start marching in unison. Understanding how these plague insects coordinate their motion is crucial for developing evidence-based control, such as forecasting swarm movements. In addition, revealing the nature of inter-individual interactions is key to understanding how collective motion emerges among social animal species more broadly.