Anisotropic interaction and motion states of locusts in a hopper band

Swarming locusts present a quintessential example of animal collective motion. Juvenile locusts march and hop across the ground in coordinated groups called hopper bands. Composed of up to millions of insects, hopper bands exhibit coordinated motion and various collective structures. These groups are well-documented in the field, but the individual insects themselves are typically studied in much smaller groups in laboratory experiments. We present the first trajectory data that detail the movement of individual locusts within a hopper band in a natural setting. Using automated video tracking, we derive our data from footage of four distinct hopper bands of the Australian plague locust, Chortoicetes terminifera. We reconstruct nearly twenty-thousand individual trajectories composed of over 3.3 million locust positions. We classify these data into three motion states: stationary, walking, and hopping. Distributions of relative neighbor positions reveal anisotropies that depend on motion ..., See Methods in the associated manuscript: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.29.466390
See also the README file in the associated GitHub repository: https://github.com/weinburd/locust_trajectory_data, , # Trajectory data for locusts in a hopper band

This repository contains data used in creating the work:

* J Weinburd, J Landsberg, A Kravtsova, S Lam, T Sharma, SJ Simpson, GA Sword, C Buhl. *Anisotropic interaction and motion state of locusts in a hopper band.* Preprint on bioRxiv.

The contents include numerical position-time data extracted from raw video footage of locust hoppers in the field. The video was recorded by Drs. Stephen J Simpson, Greg A Sword, and Camille Buhl and provided as part of an ongoing collaboration. Students who have contributed to this project include: Anna Kravtsova (Eastern Washington U), Shanni Lam (HMC), Jacob Landsberg (Haverford), and Tarush Sharma (HMC).

Give a brief summary of dataset contents, contextualized in experimental procedures and results.

## Description of the data and file structure

The main data set is contained in two Matlab data files .mat which include cleaned and processed numerical trajectories and two subdirectories.

1. da...