A Density-Based Model for Mosquito Swarms

Abstract

Flock and swarm models are mostly based on the alignment of the velocity vectors of animals (birds, fishes, bats, etc.), following the very successful Vicsek model. Here, we explore a simple alternative where the animal decides the sense of its movement based only on the number of neighbors and the weak dependence on a landmark. This defines a class of density-based interacting random walks which seems to describe qualitatively mosquito swarms. The model presents a phase transition-like behavior that seems to be interesting to apply to stationary swarms, in general.