Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum here. Individually, a European starling is a
Speaker 1: common blackbird. That's it. Starlings are short and thick, with
Speaker 1: dark feathers and long, pointy bills. If you live in
Speaker 1: North America or Europe, you've seen them, though birdwatchers have
Speaker 1: spotted them throughout most of the world. More than two
Speaker 1: hundred million live here in North America alone, singing their
Speaker 1: chirpy songs and being too many backyard growers and full
Speaker 1: time farmers a bit on the pesti side. Collectively, though,
Speaker 1: starlings transform into something else entirely together in flight, in
Speaker 1: mesmerizing flocks that sometimes number in the hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1: They are a breath stealing wonder, a pulsating, swooping, harmonized whole,
Speaker 1: seemingly defying the laws of nature while defining nature itself.
Speaker 1: To watch a murmuration of starlings in mid air, and
Speaker 1: that's what the flocking behavior is called, a murmuration, is
Speaker 1: to experience firsthand the power and mystery of the natural world.
Speaker 1: We spoke with Mario Pessendorfer, a post doctoral associate at
Speaker 1: the Cornell lab of ornithology, who's also a research associate
Speaker 1: at the Smithsonians Migratory Bird Center. He said, I think
Speaker 1: that the core feeling is a sense of awe, the
Speaker 1: spatial scale of something that's moving very rapidly, which we
Speaker 1: are utterly unable to do, and the visual patterning that
Speaker 1: occurs when a lot of individuals are doing the same
Speaker 1: thing really mesmerizes us. Murmurations spark curiosity, and they spark
Speaker 1: scientists like Pessendorfer to figure out how swarming animals like
Speaker 1: beads and birds and fish can better our own lives.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirties, famed ornithologist Edmund Sellis suggested that
Speaker 1: birds moving and murmurations were using some sort of telepathy
Speaker 1: to transmit their flying intentions. He wrote in his book
Speaker 1: thought transference, or what in birds they must think collectively
Speaker 1: all at the same time, a flash out of so
Speaker 1: many brains. As the years wore on, we found out
Speaker 1: that that's not quite it. In the scientists studying insects
Speaker 1: and fish and other collective animal behavior positive that group
Speaker 1: movement is more of a stunningly fast response to others
Speaker 1: in the flock or school or swarm, rather than some
Speaker 1: innate mind reading ability, or a command from a group leader.
Speaker 1: The authors of paper published in the journal Proceedings that
Speaker 1: the National Academy of Sciences wrote, it's the rapid transmission
Speaker 1: of local behavior response to neighbors that enables such startling synchronicity.
Speaker 1: Piasendorfer said, there's two ways that you can elicit large
Speaker 1: group behavior. You can have the top down control, where
Speaker 1: you have some kind of leadership or some kind of
Speaker 1: top down mechanism. A think of a rock show. You
Speaker 1: have the rock star in the front and he starts
Speaker 1: clapping his hands and the whole stadium starts clapping. But
Speaker 1: these marmurations are actually self organized, meaning that it's the
Speaker 1: individual's little behavioral rules that make its scale up to
Speaker 1: the large group. In order to understand this behavior, we
Speaker 1: have to go from the local scale what the individual
Speaker 1: is doing, what are the rules that the individual is following,
Speaker 1: to the global scale what is the outcome? In A
Speaker 1: mechanical and aerospace engineer and her team from Princeton collaborated
Speaker 1: with physicists in Italy to study murmurations. Naomi Leonard, the
Speaker 1: Princeton engineer, said, back then, in a flock with one
Speaker 1: thousand two hundred birds. It's clear that not every bird
Speaker 1: will be able to keep track of the other one
Speaker 1: thousand one nine birds, So an important question is who
Speaker 1: is keeping track of whom. The Italian physicists used more
Speaker 1: than four hundred photos from several videos to find out,
Speaker 1: plotting the position and speed of birds as they flocked.
Speaker 1: From that, they built a mathematical model that identified the
Speaker 1: optimal number of flockmates for each bird to track. It
Speaker 1: turns out the magic number is seven. Each bird keeps
Speaker 1: tabs on its seven closest neighbors and ignores all else.
Speaker 1: Considering all these little groups of seven touch on other individuals,
Speaker 1: and groups of seven twists and turns quickly spread and
Speaker 1: from that a whole murmuration moves. Although it looks coordinated
Speaker 1: on a large scale, the individual birds are concerned with
Speaker 1: only three aspects of their flight and the flight of
Speaker 1: those around them. These factors have been described in several ways,
Speaker 1: but they boiled down similarly. They are an attraction zone,
Speaker 1: an area where you're going to move toward the next
Speaker 1: bird over, a repulsion zone, an area where you don't
Speaker 1: fly because you'll interfere with another bird and you'll both fall,
Speaker 1: and angular alignment, meaning that you're following a neighboring bird's
Speaker 1: directional movement. Peasant Doorffer said, depending on how you change
Speaker 1: those three parameters, you can get everything from those barrel
Speaker 1: looking baseballs that you get an ocean fish, to loose
Speaker 1: looking insect swarms, to highly highly organized fish swarms and murmurations,
Speaker 1: all in those three little parameters. Scientists believe these birds
Speaker 1: flock in the first place to confuse and discourage predators
Speaker 1: through their sheer numbers. With the noise such a flock makes,
Speaker 1: and of course it's motion. Some communication between birds may
Speaker 1: be happening to in mmerations, say pointing out good food sources,
Speaker 1: or the birds may simply be keeping warm. What maybe
Speaker 1: most stunning to mere humans is that these birds react
Speaker 1: so quickly, and do so in such synchronization. If not
Speaker 1: immediately within a couple of flaps of a bird's wings,
Speaker 1: they move almost as one in a type of lock
Speaker 1: step or as it were, block flap. But how birds
Speaker 1: can take in certain information around them and process it
Speaker 1: much more quickly than humans. They see faster than we do.
Speaker 1: They basically have a higher frame rate. Back in Craig Reynolds,
Speaker 1: an m I T trained computer scientists built computer models
Speaker 1: of bird flocking and fish schooling in something he called
Speaker 1: Boyd's These programs provided the basis for lifelike animation in movies, initially,
Speaker 1: and notably a swarm of bats in the Tim Burton
Speaker 1: film Batman Returns. In applications to real life, the ability
Speaker 1: to understand the behavioral movements of large groups of starlings
Speaker 1: or bats or bees or whatever, and to program swarms
Speaker 1: of robots and making similar movements has amazing possibilities. This
Speaker 1: is called bio mimicry or bio memetics. An example, Las
Speaker 1: Combres Observatory has twenty two robotic telescopes on seven sides
Speaker 1: around the world that coordinate with each other to function
Speaker 1: as one big telescope. From the LCO website. It's called
Speaker 1: time domain astronomy, which means that we can continually watch
Speaker 1: phenomena in space as they change. When we get to
Speaker 1: see the big picture as it unfolds, we're able to
Speaker 1: learn more, learn it faster, and dramatically increase our understanding
Speaker 1: of the forces that drive the universe. Another example, the
Speaker 1: emerging field of swarm robotics, uses information gleaned from the
Speaker 1: study of starlings that could, according to the vis Institute
Speaker 1: at Harvard Quote, enable new approaches for search and rescue missions,
Speaker 1: construction efforts, environmental remediation, and medical applications. A swarm robotics
Speaker 1: could also have used in military applications, like micro drones
Speaker 1: released from fighter aircraft. A swarm of self driving cars
Speaker 1: working together could help reduce or eliminate traffic jams. All
Speaker 1: from watching, studying, learning, and building on the wondrous flocking
Speaker 1: of this simple bird, Pisendorfer said, as humans who have
Speaker 1: very complicated decision making processes, we're not used to looking
Speaker 1: at simple decision making processes that scale up to what
Speaker 1: looks like complex behavior. These models help us understand these
Speaker 1: types of patterns. Today's episode was written by John Donovan
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is a production
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this
Speaker 1: and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how
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