WEBVTT - How Do Starling Murmurations Work? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:06.840 Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain 0:00:06.840 --> 0:00:11.400 Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum here. Individually, a European starling is a 0:00:11.440 --> 0:00:15.720 common blackbird. That's it. Starlings are short and thick, with 0:00:15.920 --> 0:00:18.880 dark feathers and long, pointy bills. If you live in 0:00:18.880 --> 0:00:22.040 North America or Europe, you've seen them, though birdwatchers have 0:00:22.079 --> 0:00:25.080 spotted them throughout most of the world. More than two 0:00:25.160 --> 0:00:28.080 hundred million live here in North America alone, singing their 0:00:28.160 --> 0:00:30.760 chirpy songs and being too many backyard growers and full 0:00:30.800 --> 0:00:34.680 time farmers a bit on the pesti side. Collectively, though, 0:00:34.920 --> 0:00:39.559 starlings transform into something else entirely together in flight, in 0:00:39.680 --> 0:00:42.720 mesmerizing flocks that sometimes number in the hundreds of thousands. 0:00:42.920 --> 0:00:47.400 They are a breath stealing wonder, a pulsating, swooping, harmonized whole, 0:00:47.720 --> 0:00:52.040 seemingly defying the laws of nature while defining nature itself. 0:00:52.920 --> 0:00:55.320 To watch a murmuration of starlings in mid air, and 0:00:55.480 --> 0:00:58.520 that's what the flocking behavior is called, a murmuration, is 0:00:58.560 --> 0:01:02.080 to experience firsthand the power and mystery of the natural world. 0:01:03.480 --> 0:01:06.480 We spoke with Mario Pessendorfer, a post doctoral associate at 0:01:06.480 --> 0:01:09.360 the Cornell lab of ornithology, who's also a research associate 0:01:09.360 --> 0:01:13.360 at the Smithsonians Migratory Bird Center. He said, I think 0:01:13.400 --> 0:01:15.840 that the core feeling is a sense of awe, the 0:01:15.959 --> 0:01:19.200 spatial scale of something that's moving very rapidly, which we 0:01:19.240 --> 0:01:21.959 are utterly unable to do, and the visual patterning that 0:01:22.000 --> 0:01:24.240 occurs when a lot of individuals are doing the same 0:01:24.280 --> 0:01:30.240 thing really mesmerizes us. Murmurations spark curiosity, and they spark 0:01:30.280 --> 0:01:33.679 scientists like Pessendorfer to figure out how swarming animals like 0:01:33.800 --> 0:01:36.760 beads and birds and fish can better our own lives. 0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:41.560 In the nineteen thirties, famed ornithologist Edmund Sellis suggested that 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:44.560 birds moving and murmurations were using some sort of telepathy 0:01:44.600 --> 0:01:47.480 to transmit their flying intentions. He wrote in his book 0:01:47.640 --> 0:01:51.840 thought transference, or what in birds they must think collectively 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:54.080 all at the same time, a flash out of so 0:01:54.120 --> 0:01:57.320 many brains. As the years wore on, we found out 0:01:57.360 --> 0:02:01.600 that that's not quite it. In the scientists studying insects 0:02:01.640 --> 0:02:04.920 and fish and other collective animal behavior positive that group 0:02:04.960 --> 0:02:07.840 movement is more of a stunningly fast response to others 0:02:07.840 --> 0:02:10.760 in the flock or school or swarm, rather than some 0:02:10.880 --> 0:02:14.240 innate mind reading ability, or a command from a group leader. 0:02:15.720 --> 0:02:18.760 The authors of paper published in the journal Proceedings that 0:02:18.800 --> 0:02:22.480 the National Academy of Sciences wrote, it's the rapid transmission 0:02:22.480 --> 0:02:27.639 of local behavior response to neighbors that enables such startling synchronicity. 0:02:28.320 --> 0:02:31.519 Piasendorfer said, there's two ways that you can elicit large 0:02:31.520 --> 0:02:34.440 group behavior. You can have the top down control, where 0:02:34.440 --> 0:02:36.520 you have some kind of leadership or some kind of 0:02:36.520 --> 0:02:39.080 top down mechanism. A think of a rock show. You 0:02:39.080 --> 0:02:41.079 have the rock star in the front and he starts 0:02:41.080 --> 0:02:44.200 clapping his hands and the whole stadium starts clapping. But 0:02:44.240 --> 0:02:47.760 these marmurations are actually self organized, meaning that it's the 0:02:47.800 --> 0:02:50.919 individual's little behavioral rules that make its scale up to 0:02:50.960 --> 0:02:54.160 the large group. In order to understand this behavior, we 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:56.520 have to go from the local scale what the individual 0:02:56.639 --> 0:02:59.280 is doing, what are the rules that the individual is following, 0:02:59.600 --> 0:03:04.519 to the global scale what is the outcome? In A 0:03:04.639 --> 0:03:08.239 mechanical and aerospace engineer and her team from Princeton collaborated 0:03:08.280 --> 0:03:12.440 with physicists in Italy to study murmurations. Naomi Leonard, the 0:03:12.520 --> 0:03:15.480 Princeton engineer, said, back then, in a flock with one 0:03:15.520 --> 0:03:18.280 thousand two hundred birds. It's clear that not every bird 0:03:18.280 --> 0:03:19.919 will be able to keep track of the other one 0:03:19.960 --> 0:03:24.040 thousand one nine birds, So an important question is who 0:03:24.160 --> 0:03:28.800 is keeping track of whom. The Italian physicists used more 0:03:28.840 --> 0:03:31.639 than four hundred photos from several videos to find out, 0:03:31.919 --> 0:03:34.519 plotting the position and speed of birds as they flocked. 0:03:35.480 --> 0:03:38.000 From that, they built a mathematical model that identified the 0:03:38.000 --> 0:03:41.960 optimal number of flockmates for each bird to track. It 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:45.160 turns out the magic number is seven. Each bird keeps 0:03:45.160 --> 0:03:48.360 tabs on its seven closest neighbors and ignores all else. 0:03:49.040 --> 0:03:52.200 Considering all these little groups of seven touch on other individuals, 0:03:52.240 --> 0:03:55.920 and groups of seven twists and turns quickly spread and 0:03:56.120 --> 0:04:01.000 from that a whole murmuration moves. Although it looks coordinated 0:04:01.000 --> 0:04:03.760 on a large scale, the individual birds are concerned with 0:04:03.840 --> 0:04:06.360 only three aspects of their flight and the flight of 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:09.720 those around them. These factors have been described in several ways, 0:04:09.760 --> 0:04:13.760 but they boiled down similarly. They are an attraction zone, 0:04:14.240 --> 0:04:16.680 an area where you're going to move toward the next 0:04:16.720 --> 0:04:20.240 bird over, a repulsion zone, an area where you don't 0:04:20.279 --> 0:04:23.120 fly because you'll interfere with another bird and you'll both fall, 0:04:23.600 --> 0:04:27.080 and angular alignment, meaning that you're following a neighboring bird's 0:04:27.160 --> 0:04:31.560 directional movement. Peasant Doorffer said, depending on how you change 0:04:31.600 --> 0:04:34.240 those three parameters, you can get everything from those barrel 0:04:34.240 --> 0:04:36.960 looking baseballs that you get an ocean fish, to loose 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:41.560 looking insect swarms, to highly highly organized fish swarms and murmurations, 0:04:42.120 --> 0:04:46.159 all in those three little parameters. Scientists believe these birds 0:04:46.160 --> 0:04:48.960 flock in the first place to confuse and discourage predators 0:04:48.960 --> 0:04:51.880 through their sheer numbers. With the noise such a flock makes, 0:04:51.960 --> 0:04:55.800 and of course it's motion. Some communication between birds may 0:04:55.800 --> 0:04:59.760 be happening to in mmerations, say pointing out good food sources, 0:04:59.880 --> 0:05:04.040 or the birds may simply be keeping warm. What maybe 0:05:04.160 --> 0:05:06.719 most stunning to mere humans is that these birds react 0:05:06.800 --> 0:05:10.080 so quickly, and do so in such synchronization. If not 0:05:10.160 --> 0:05:12.720 immediately within a couple of flaps of a bird's wings, 0:05:13.200 --> 0:05:15.440 they move almost as one in a type of lock 0:05:15.520 --> 0:05:20.440 step or as it were, block flap. But how birds 0:05:20.480 --> 0:05:23.080 can take in certain information around them and process it 0:05:23.240 --> 0:05:26.840 much more quickly than humans. They see faster than we do. 0:05:27.080 --> 0:05:32.560 They basically have a higher frame rate. Back in Craig Reynolds, 0:05:32.560 --> 0:05:35.760 an m I T trained computer scientists built computer models 0:05:35.760 --> 0:05:38.920 of bird flocking and fish schooling in something he called 0:05:39.080 --> 0:05:44.440 Boyd's These programs provided the basis for lifelike animation in movies, initially, 0:05:44.520 --> 0:05:47.960 and notably a swarm of bats in the Tim Burton 0:05:48.000 --> 0:05:52.760 film Batman Returns. In applications to real life, the ability 0:05:52.800 --> 0:05:55.960 to understand the behavioral movements of large groups of starlings 0:05:56.040 --> 0:05:59.239 or bats or bees or whatever, and to program swarms 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:03.520 of robots and making similar movements has amazing possibilities. This 0:06:03.600 --> 0:06:08.080 is called bio mimicry or bio memetics. An example, Las 0:06:08.120 --> 0:06:11.880 Combres Observatory has twenty two robotic telescopes on seven sides 0:06:11.920 --> 0:06:14.600 around the world that coordinate with each other to function 0:06:14.640 --> 0:06:19.559 as one big telescope. From the LCO website. It's called 0:06:19.640 --> 0:06:23.159 time domain astronomy, which means that we can continually watch 0:06:23.240 --> 0:06:26.440 phenomena in space as they change. When we get to 0:06:26.440 --> 0:06:28.960 see the big picture as it unfolds, we're able to 0:06:29.040 --> 0:06:32.880 learn more, learn it faster, and dramatically increase our understanding 0:06:32.920 --> 0:06:36.680 of the forces that drive the universe. Another example, the 0:06:36.760 --> 0:06:40.320 emerging field of swarm robotics, uses information gleaned from the 0:06:40.320 --> 0:06:43.279 study of starlings that could, according to the vis Institute 0:06:43.320 --> 0:06:47.400 at Harvard Quote, enable new approaches for search and rescue missions, 0:06:47.400 --> 0:06:53.480 construction efforts, environmental remediation, and medical applications. A swarm robotics 0:06:53.480 --> 0:06:56.600 could also have used in military applications, like micro drones 0:06:56.640 --> 0:06:59.960 released from fighter aircraft. A swarm of self driving cars 0:07:00.040 --> 0:07:03.360 working together could help reduce or eliminate traffic jams. All 0:07:03.440 --> 0:07:06.839 from watching, studying, learning, and building on the wondrous flocking 0:07:06.920 --> 0:07:11.640 of this simple bird, Pisendorfer said, as humans who have 0:07:11.760 --> 0:07:15.160 very complicated decision making processes, we're not used to looking 0:07:15.200 --> 0:07:18.040 at simple decision making processes that scale up to what 0:07:18.160 --> 0:07:22.240 looks like complex behavior. These models help us understand these 0:07:22.280 --> 0:07:30.400 types of patterns. Today's episode was written by John Donovan 0:07:30.440 --> 0:07:33.040 and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is a production 0:07:33.080 --> 0:07:35.320 of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this 0:07:35.440 --> 0:07:37.600 and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how 0:07:37.640 --> 0:07:40.120 stuff Works dot com and for more. 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