Have you heard of this?
It's an incredible sight. Starlings utilize murmuration in defense against predators, such as hawks or falcons. A starling murmuration is especially fluid in motion and can occur in grand scale.
I bumped into this video and just had to find out what this was all about.
The starlings ability to do this in such large proportions has to do with their effective perspective range. Essentially, the ability of one starling to predict and read the behavior of another on the opposite end of the flock.
This article explains it well:
“Imagine a game of telephone: one person passes a message along to the next person, who repeats it to another, and so on. For humans, the telephone message loses information very quickly—that’s what makes the game fun. The first finding, by Cavagna’s team, suggests that very little information is lost in a starling flock. The second finding, by Young’s team, suggests that starlings “play telephone” with their seven nearest neighbors. Somehow they are able to process messages from those seven neighbors all at once, and this is a part of their method for achieving scale-free correlation.”
photos courtesy of design boom.com
Absolutely beautiful, right? Inspiring. I wonder if humans could communicate like this - would our world be more peaceful? More capable of empathy and interdependence? What do you think?
Nature is stunning. Darwin would sigh at their ingenuity, survival of the fittest.