BrainStuff Classics: How Do Starling Murmurations Work?

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Incogni. Data brokers bundle your name, address, phone number, and relatives and sell that file. Incogni sends legal removal requests across more than 420 harmful broker sites and keeps checking back. Its exposure scanner searches the wider web, surfaces your exposed profiles in one place, and gets custom removals handled by privacy specialists. Go to Incogni.com-slashbrainstuff. Code-brainstuff for 60% off an annual plan. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I-.com-slashbrainstuff. Risk-free, 30-day money-back guarantee. Hitting your protein goals has never been this easy or tasted so good. Introducing Skypop Protein Soda, the refreshing soda with 10 grams of complete protein, and no misleading collagen fillers. Visit your local Costco now and pick up the variety pack featuring three delicious flavors, light, refreshing, and ready for wherever your day takes you.

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2:01thanks to collagen peptides. Cheers to that. So you can stay vital, stay you. Visit vitalproteons.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements are not evaluated by the food and proven administration. This product is not intended to diagnose treat you or prevent any disease. Love discovering new music before anyone else? Stop being interested in the food. Start making the rules and work with your new favorite artist before they even break. The beam is a free music competition app where real emerging artists compete, you vote, and massive brand step in to fund the next big name. Your votes change careers. Find them first. Download the beam at thebeam.com or on the App Store. Vote for an artist you love or discover your next obsession. It's the first music chart that A's art is created. Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, Brain Stuff. Lauren Bogobom here with another classic episode for you. In this one, we dive into the startling simplicity behind the complex flight displays of groups of starlings. They're so impressive that researchers are using them to help power other complicated processes.

3:03Hey, Brain Stuff. Lauren Bogobom 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 that, you can see the difference between the two. If you live in North America or Europe, you've seen them. Though birdwatchers have spotted them throughout most of the world. More than 200 million live here in North America alone, singing their chirpy songs and being to many backyard growers and full-time farmers, a bit on the pesticide. Collectively, though, starlings transform into something else entirely. Together in flight and mesmerizing flocks that sometimes number in the hundreds of thousands, they are a breath-stealing wonder, a pulsating swooping, harmonized hole, seemingly defined the laws of nature while defining nature itself. To watch a murmuration of starlings in midair, that's what the flocking behavior is called.

4:05A murmuration is to experience firsthand the power and mystery of the natural world. We spoke with Mario Pesendorfer, a post-actorial associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who's also a research associate at the Smithsonian's 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. Marmerations spark curiosity, and they spark scientists like Pesendorfer to figure out how swarming animals, like beads and birds and fish, can better our own lives. In the 1930s, famed ornithologist Edmund Celis suggested that birds moving in 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.

5:07In the 1950s, 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 a 2015 paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences wrote, it's the rapid transmission of local behavior response to neighbors that enables such startling synchronicity. Piesendorfer 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 murmurations are actually self-organized, meaning that it's the individual's little behavioral rules that make it 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.

6:11In 2013, 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 1,200 birds, it's clear that not every bird will be able to keep track of the other 1,199 birds. So an important question is, who is keeping track of whom? The Italian physicists used more than 400 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. Though 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.

7:16So these factors have been described in several ways, but they boil 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 Dorfer said, depending on how you change those three parameters, you can get everything from those barrel-looking baseballs that you get an oceanfish 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, its motion. Some communication between birds may be happening two in murmurations, as they point out good food sources, or the birds may simply be keeping warm. What may be most stunning to mere humans is that these birds react so quickly and do so in such synchronization, if not immediately within a couple flaps of a bird's wings, they move almost as one in a type of lock step or, as it were, block flap.

8:27But 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 1986, Craig Reynolds, an MIT-trained computer scientist, built computer models of bird-flocking and fish schooling in something he called Bois. These programs provided the basis for life-like animation in movies, initially and notably a swarm of bats in the 1992 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 into making similar movements has amazing possibilities. This is called biominicry or biomimetics. An example, Las Combras Observatory has 22 robotic telescopes on seven sites 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.

9:34When 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 use 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. Pisan Dorfer 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 is based on the article, The Secrets in Science Behind Starling Marmorations on Howstuffworks.com, written by John Donovan.

10:42Brain stepped its production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Howstuffworks.com and is produced by Tyler Claying. Four more shows from iHeart Podcasts, Visiting the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. One last thing before you go, you know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction, chat GPT work can make sense of it all, turning scattered inputs into ready to review work. With your permission, work in chat GPT can gather context from apps and files, summarize incoming messages, rebuild decks, and help finalize high quality documents for your team or clients. Stay in control as you move from a goal to polished work faster with chat GPT work. Download the chat GPT desktop app today and take on your most ambitious work. Hitting your protein goals has never been this easy or tasted so good.

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