Insect visuomotor delay adjustments in group flight support swarm cohesion

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Ecology
• Systems Neuroscience
• Biophysics

Background:

• Coordinated flight in flying insects is essential for survival and reproduction.
• Understanding the sensory and motor mechanisms underlying collective behavior is a key challenge.
• Strict communication and processing constraints in insect swarms necessitate efficient coordination strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To experimentally quantify visuomotor delays in flying insects during solo and group tracking tasks.
• To develop and analyze a computational model of insect swarms incorporating heterogeneous delays.
• To assess the impact of visuomotor delays on swarm stability and cohesion.

Main Methods:

• Recording and analyzing 450 insect trajectories tracking a moving visual stimulus.
• Applying system identification techniques to determine tracking dynamics and visuomotor delays.
• Developing an interconnected visual swarm model with heterogeneous delays and performing bifurcation analysis and simulations.

Main Results:

• Quantified visual tracking delay variation in solitary (30ms average, 50ms std dev) and group behaviors (15ms average, 8ms std dev).
• Demonstrated that reduced and heterogeneous delays in group flight support swarm formation and center stability.
• Showed that delay adjustments are robust to measurement noise, highlighting their reliability.

Conclusions:

• Visuomotor delay heterogeneity plays a crucial role in enabling coordinated flight in insect swarms.
• Implicit communication through adjusted visuomotor delays facilitates swarm cohesion and stability.
• These findings provide quantitative insights into the mechanisms of collective behavior in flying insects.