The collective motion of groups of animals emerges from the net effect of the
interactions between individual members of the group. In many cases, such as
birds, fish, or ungulates, these interactions are mediated by sensory stimuli
that predominantly arise from nearby neighbors. But not all stimuli in animal
groups are short range. Here, we consider mating swarms of midges, which
interact primarily via long-range acoustic stimuli. We exploit the similarity
in form between the decay of acoustic and gravitational sources to build a
model for swarm behavior. By accounting for the adaptive nature of the midges'
acoustic sensing, we show that our "adaptive gravity" model makes mean-field
predictions that agree well with experimental observations of laboratory
swarms. Our results highlight the role of sensory mechanisms and interaction
range in collective animal behavior. The adaptive interactions that we present
here open a new class of equations of motion, which may appear in other
biological contexts.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figure
