![]() 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. The second finding, by Young’s team, suggests that starlings “play telephone” with their seven nearest neighbors. The first finding, by Cavagna’s team, suggests that very little information is lost in a starling flock. For humans, the telephone message loses information very quickly-that’s what makes the game fun. Imagine a game of telephone: one person passes a message along to the next person, who repeats it to another, and so on. They also found that the shape of the flock, rather than the size, has the largest effect on this number seven seems optimal for the tightly connected flocks that starlings are known for. They determined that starlings in large flocks consistently coordinate their movements with their seven nearest neighbors. The researchers, led by George Young at Princeton, did their own analysis of murmuration images to see how the birds adjust to their flockmates. Last week, a new study on starling flocks appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. This scale-free correlation allows starlings to greatly enhance what the researchers call “effective perceptive range,” which is another way of saying that a starling on one side of the flock can respond to what others are sensing all the way across the flock-a huge benefit for a starling trying to avoid a falcon. The researchers describe it as a high signal-to-noise ratio. In essence, information moves across the flock very quickly and with nearly no degradation. When one starling changes direction or speed, each of the other birds in the flock responds to the change, and they do so nearly simultaneously regardless of the size of the flock. As the researchers put it, “the group respond as one” and “cannot be divided into independent subparts.” But the remarkable thing about starling flocks is their fluidity of motion. Even in the case of flocks of geese, which appear to have a leader, the movement of the flock is actually governed collectively by all of the flock members. Surprising as it may be, flocks of birds are never led by a single individual. They found that starling flocks model a complex physical phenomenon, seldom observed in physical and biological systems, known as scale-free correlation. In 2010, Andrea Cavagna and colleagues at the National Council of Research and the University of Rome used advanced computational modeling and video analysis to study this question. So how do these masses of birds move so synchronously, swiftly, and gracefully? This isn’t an idle question-it has attracted the attention of physicists interested in how group behavior can spontaneously arise from many individuals at once. ![]() The Basics of Bird Migration: How, Why, and Where
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