  Previous work has suggested that disordered swarms of flying insects can be
well modeled as self-gravitating systems, as long as the "gravitational"
interaction is adaptive. Motivated by this work we compare the predictions of
the classic, mean-field King model for isothermal globular clusters to
observations of insect swarms. Detailed numerical simulations of regular and
adaptive gravity allow us to expose the features of the swarms' density
profiles that are captured by the King model phenomenology, and those that are
due to adaptivity and short-range repulsion. Our results provide further
support for adaptive gravity as a model for swarms.
