How Swarming Insects Act Like Fluids

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.

Starlings take to the sky in swirling vortices; ants teem like rivers. “They stretch, they move around, but they retain cohesion in a way you’d expect from a fluid moving,” said Nicholas Ouellette, a physicist at Stanford University. That’s why to him, it isn’t far-fetched to think about collective animal behavior in the language of fluid mechanics, or to analyze groups of organisms much as an engineer would analyze a material.

That approach has paid off in a  in which Ouellette and his colleagues