youtu.be/M1Q-EbX6dso Starlings, which gather in the evenings to roost, will often participate in what is called a murmuration — a huge flock that shape-shifts in the sky as if it were one swirling liquid mass. This behavior is often sparked by the presence of a predator, like a hawk, and the movement is based on evasive maneuvers. There is safety in numbers, so the individual starlings do not scatter, but rather are able to move as an intelligent cloud, feinting away from a diving raptor, thousands of birds changing direction almost simultaneously. The question that has had scientists stumped is how a bird, tens or hundreds of birds away from those nearest danger, sense the shift and move in unison? Giorgio Parisi, a theoretical physicist with the University of Rome, wrote: The change in the behavioral state of one animal affects and is affected by that of all other animals in the group, no matter how large the group is. Scale-free correlations provide each animal with an effective perception range much larger than the direct inter-individual interaction range, thus enhancing global response to perturbations
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 16:04:42 +0000
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