I was honored to participate in groundbreaking experiments just published in Science (Sayin et al. 2025) that have revolutionized our understanding of the behavioral interactions underlying Desert locust collective movement in migratory hopper bands. The work was conducted in part during my sabbatical with wonderful hosts and collaborators at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz in 2023.
The paper combines field data along with an awesome combination of virtual reality experiments, large scale collective movement trials and modeling to show that Desert locust juveniles rely primarily on visual cues to maintain coordinated group movement while mass moving on the ground in hopper bands. Virtual reality experiments clearly showed that individuals do not explicitly align their movement with nearby other individuals – contrary to expectations. Instead, they simply follow those in front that are moving away and will do so independent of their local density. In other words, locust collective movement depends on the quality rather than quantity of visual stimuli they receive from other locusts in front of them to maintain coordinated movement while marching in a band.
Camille Buhl and Steve Simpson provided an excellent accompanying Perspectives article: “Virtual reality rewrites rules of the swarm”.
Check out the video abstract above highlighting the key results and showcasing some of the killer technology used – all served up with a tasty backing track from The Four Pigs. Link to video abstract on YouTube is here.
The story has been picked up by several news outlets as well. Here’s a nice feature article from phys.org: “Scientists rewrite the rules of swarming locusts“.