Phase transitions in insect swarms

In contrast with laboratory insect swarms, wild insect swarms display significant coordinated behaviour. It has been hypothesised that the presence of a fluctuating environment drives the formation of transient, local order (synchronized subgroups), and that this local order pushes the swarm into a new state that is robust to environmental perturbations. The hypothesis is supported by observations of swarming mosquitoes. Here I provide numerical evidence that the formation of transient, local order is an accidental by-product of the strengthening of short-range repulsion which is expected in the presence of environmental fluctuations. The results of the numerical simulations reveal that this strengthening of the short-range can drive swarms into a crystalline phase containing subgroups that participate in cooperative ring exchanges – a new putative form of collective animal movement lacking velocity correlation. I thereby demonstrate that the swarm state and structure may be tuneable with environmental noise as a control parameter. Predicted properties of the collective modes are consistent with observations of transient synchronized subgroups in wild mosquito swarms that contend with environmental disturbances. When mutual repulsion becomes sufficiently strong, swarms are, in accordance with observations, predicted to form near stationary crystalline states. The analysis suggests that the many different forms of swarming motions observed across insect species are not distinctly different phenomena but are instead different phases of a single phenomenon.