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Researchers at the University of Bath have drawn out a mathematical model to explain the nature of swarming locusts. Individual locusts during swarming interact with at least two locusts nearby, so that they can align and march uniformly.

Earlier, the research said that flank protection is the reason for this kind of behaviour.

The movements of locusts in various group sizes with footage taken by colleagues at The University of Adelaide helped the scientists to represent their collective behavior. The model showed that they tend to get affected by external environmental changes such as wind conditions, disrupting their interactions and stability.

"We can describe the locusts' behavior using quite simple rules and have demonstrated for the first time that locusts have to interact with multiple neighbors in order to swarm in the way they do," Kit Yates, co-author of the study, said in a press release. "We already know that animals, including humans, change their behavior when they are in a crowd, following cues from their peers. In the locust study, we found that small groups of locusts are unstable and tend not to march together - a behavior mimicked in our model."

Hence, the model can give a direction to scientists regarding the swarming behaviour of locusts, and also help to manage them in places in which the destroy the environment, such as in Argentina.

"A better understanding of how individuals behave in these groups could help us develop new strategies of disrupting swarms," said Yates. "Our model could also be applied to other swarming insects such as crickets, which are a major problem in Australia, and even in crowd dynamics of humans."

The dynamics of locust swarming have thus been represented by mathematical models.

"Our model helps us to understand how the individual decisions made by each locust using the information available to them can result in the dynamics we observe in the group as a whole," said Louise Dyson, another co-author of the study.

The findings were published in the Nov. 6 issue of Physical Review E.