Excellent.. Starling flight is as mesmerizing as it is mystifying—flocks of hundreds or thousands of birds sweep across the sky as if a single organism. The birds flying over Rome in particular have captured the imagination of bird enthusiasts, tourists, film makers and scientists alike. How do individual birds know when to turn and which way? Some have suggested its a random thing, each bird simply flies making sure not to run into a neighbor. Others have suggested that some birds initiate a turn and others follow, creating a diffusion effect. In this new study, the researchers suggest that none of the earlier theories is correct—theyve come up with something brand new. To get a better look at the birds in flight, the researchers recorded flocks flying over Rome with high speed cameras and then took the results into their lab for examination. They found that turns are almost always initiated by just a few birds, but rather than other birds trying to figure out where to turn too, they instead simply copy how sharply their neighbor turns. This allows for the turn message to propagate through the flock at a very fast constant speed—approximately 20 to 40 meters per second, the team calculated. That constant message transfer speed means that each bird in a flock can respond in as little as half a second, without causing the flock to break apart. Perhaps even more interesting is that when the researchers applied a spin factor for the turns by the birds, they found that applying it to the flock as a whole allowed for use of the same mathematical equations as physicists use to describe superfluid helium. The researchers believe thats not a coincidence, as there are many examples of physics and math principles that apply to the natural world. Read more at: phys.org/news/2014-07-starling-flight-reveals-message-bird.html#jCp phys.org/news/2014-07-starling-flight-reveals-message-bird.html
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 09:23:16 +0000
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