Foraging Fruit Flies: Lagrangian and Eulerian Descriptions of Insect Swarming

• Main Author: Majkut, Joesph
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2006
• Subjects: Foraging Fruit Flies; Insect Swarming; Lagrangian and Eulerian
• Online Access: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmc_theses/183; https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1186&context=hmc_theses

In this work, I seek to model swarms of fruit flies, drosophila melanogaster, whose flights are characterized by straight flight segments interrupted by rapid turns called saccades. These flights are reminiscent of Levy-distributed random walks which are known to lead to efficient search behavior. I build two types of model for swarms of foraging fruit flies, whose behavior depends on swarm density and chemoattractant concentration, using rules inspired by experimentally observed flight patterns. First I will present a Lagrangian model where the path of each individual fly is tracked. I will also consider an Eulerian model where the fruit fly density evolves as a function of time and position in space. I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two models and the relationship between them.