Synchronizing pile formation of black soldier fly larvae
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part of Springer Nature, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2020-900264-y
THE EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL SPECIAL TOPICS
Regular Article
Synchronizing pile formation of black soldier fly larvae? Olga Shishkov1 and David L. Hu1,2,a 1
2
School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA Received 7 November 2019 / Accepted 27 July 2020 Published online 16 November 2020 Abstract. When confined to containers, black soldier fly larvae aggregate together, piling up in corners. How do these piles form, and what causes them to eventually break apart? In this combined experimental and numerical study, we confine 300 larvae to flat vertical containers and measure their activity using both time-lapse film and particle image velocimetry. Within a pile, the majority of the larvae are unable to move because their bodies are jammed. Larvae enter the pile by crawling along the less jammed floor of the container and accumulating at the wall. Using PIV analysis, we observe events that are correlated with the breakup of a pile. We hypothesize that the pile disperses if there is a downward traveling larva that frees a path in the jammed pile. We test this hypothesis with both a horizontal and vertical intruder that enters the pile. We find that a vertical intruder can synchronize the creation and disassembly of the pile, reducing its disassembly time from 60 min to 20 min. The surprising ability of foreign objects to break up a swarm may provide utility in other systems from bird flocks to fish.
1 Introduction Insects such as ants and bees are known for their ability to build vast assemblages of thousands of individuals. Fire ants survive flash floods by linking their bodies together to build waterproof rafts. When these rafts anchor to protruding vegetation, they can reform into large towers up to 30 body lengths in height [1]. Bees form large hanging swarms to protect the queen, showing similarity to stalactites [2]. The physical properties of these swarms are understood using techniques such as rheology. However, little is known about how these assemblages form in the first place, and how they disassemble. Understanding the transient behavior of assemblages will be useful to the biologists and physicists that study swarms and the roboticists that design swarming robots. In this study, we work with black soldier fly larvae (Hermetia illucens), non-pest insects raised by companies around the world as a sustainable protein source. They ?
Supplementary material in the form of three mp4 files available from the Journal web page at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2020-900264-y. a e-mail: [email protected]
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The European Physical Journal Special Topics
Fig. 1. (a) Larvae in a bin pile up in corners. The bin is about 36 cm wide. (b) The experimental setup in our study, larvae confined to a two dimensional bin formed using two vertical petri dishes. The bin is 95 mm wide.
are often raised in rectangular bins
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