We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.Īnd since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. But it may also have practical applications too, like helping develop autonomous vehicles that can travel in tight formation and work in coordinated groups without colliding. Curiosity drives this research, of course. All these synchronized movements can happen so fast within flocks, herds, swarms and schools that some scientists once thought it required animal ESP!īiologists, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists and engineers are all working to figure out how animals carry out these displays. Large schools of fish can appear to behave like murmurations, as do groups of some swarming insects, including honeybees. And they do all this while flying as fast as they can. From these simulations, it seems that each bird must keep track of seven neighbors and adjust based on what they’re doing to keep the murmuration from falling apart in a chaotic mess. Mathematicians and computer scientists try to create virtual murmurations using rules that birds might follow in a flock – like moving in the same direction as their neighbor, staying close and not colliding. Starlings on the edge frequently move deeper into the flock. Starlings are closer to their side neighbors than those in front or behind. The videos reveal that the birds are not as densely packed as they might appear from the ground there is room to maneuver. Within the murmuration, individual birds aren’t tightly packed together. Then they use computer programs to track the movements of individual starlings and create 3D models of the flock. To learn what’s happening inside murmurations, some researchers film them using many cameras at the same time. Somehow they keep track of how the flock is moving as a whole and adjust accordingly. Birds in the middle can see through the flock on all sides to its edge and beyond. Instead, scientists believe movements are coordinated by starlings observing what others around them are doing. Murmurations have no leader and follow no plan. How do starlings coordinate their behavior? That observation suggests that murmurations do form to help protect the birds from predators – but it’s also possible a huge murmuration would be what attracted a hawk, for instance, in the first place. A third of them saw a raptor attack the murmuration. Over 3,000 citizen scientist volunteers reported spotting murmurations in a recent study. It also must be careful not to collide with the flock and get hurt. A falcon or hawk can get confused and distracted by tricky wave patterns in the murmuration’s movements. Scientists call this the selfish herd effect.Īnd a gigantic mass of whirling, swirling birds can make it hard to focus on a single target. Predators are more likely to catch the nearest prey, so the swirling of a murmuration could happen as individual birds try to move toward the safer middle of the crowd. This dilution effect might be part of the reason murmurations happen: The more starlings in the flock, the lower the risk to any one bird of being the one that gets snagged by a predator. It might also reduce the chance an individual bird would be eaten overnight by a predator such as an owl or marten. One theory is that spending the night together keeps the starlings warmer as they share their body heat. Scientists think a murmuration is a visual invitation to attract other starlings to join a group night roost. Unlike the V formations of migrating geese, murmurations provide no aerodynamic advantage. After maybe 45 minutes of this spectacular aerial display, the birds all at once drop down into their roost for the night. Murmurations form about an hour before sunset in fall, winter and early spring, when the birds are near where they’ll sleep.
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