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