Paper detail

Leadership through influence: what mechanisms allow leaders to steer a swarm?

Collective migration of cells and animals often relies on a specialised set of "leaders", whose role is to steer a population of naive followers towards some target. We formulate a continuous model to understand the dynamics and structure of such groups, splitting a population into separate follower and leader types with distinct orientation responses. We incorporate "leader influence" via three principal mechanisms: a bias in the orientation of leaders according to the destination, distinct speeds of movement and distinct levels of conspicuousness. Using a combination of analysis and numerical computation on a sequence of models of increasing complexity, we assess the extent to which leaders successfully shepherd the swarm. While all three mechanisms can lead to a successfully steered swarm, parameter regime is crucial with non successful choices generating a variety of unsuccessful attempts, including movement away from the target, swarm splitting or swarm dispersal.