Cannibalism makes grasshoppers stick together!
The latest Maths by Email newsletter from CSIRO Education has brought some remarkable research news; and mathematics is at the center of it.
Scientists from around the world have spent many years researching locusts. A lot of the research had looked at what locusts like to eat. Locusts will eat almost anything they can find, but they prefer some foods more than others. By giving locusts a choice of many different types of food, the scientists could measure the most popular foods, and they came to a startling conclusion: A locust's favourite food is actually other locusts.
Pawel Romanczuk and Lutz Schimansky-Geier from Humboldt University and Iain D. Couzin from Princeton University wanted to see if they could forecast where locusts were going to go. They wrote a computer program that pretended to be a whole group of locusts. Each locust followed two rules - if there was a locust in front of them they would move closer (to try and eat them) and if there was one behind them, they would run away (so they didn't get eaten).
The locusts on the computer moved just like real locusts! This was very exciting news, because it meant real locusts probably acted the same way the computer ones did. But there was a problem - they also found that it was very hard to forecast what the locusts were going to do in the future. Little things, like a few locusts facing the wrong way, sometimes made the whole group change direction.
The scientists and mathematicians are now doing more experiments to see if they can make better predictions, or if they can find a way to guide locust swarms away from farms. More maths might make these destructive grasshoppers more manageable.
Here are the links with more information:
Math is no match for locust swarms
Cannibalism drives locust swarms
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