Flocks of birds flying in patterns12/31/2023 ![]() His camera tracking system enabled him to determine which birds in a flock were paired up and the fraction of paired birds, compared to solo birds. By winter, the chicks have fledged, so there is no reason for pairs to separate, and big transit flocks generally form. As a result, large jackdaw flocks rarely form. ![]() During that period, one half of a mated pair will remain in the nest with the offspring, while the other will forage for sustenance. They nest and rear their young in the late spring and summer. Jackdaws also mate for life, and those pairs form a kind of substructure beyond just individual birds and flocks. "All corvids are smart, and all corvids have fairly well-developed social systems, in addition to the collective behavior and flocking," Ouellette said. Jackdaws are a member of the corvid family, like crows. They also played recordings of the scolding calls jackdaws commonly use to alert their neighbors to the presence of a predator and call them to action. "But a hundred jackdaws probably beat a falcon." The researchers initiated mobbing by presenting the jackdaw flocks with a stuffed fox holding a fake flapping bird in its mouth. "A falcon definitely wins in a one-on-one dogfight between a falcon and a jackdaw," Ouellette told Ars. Transit flocks form when the birds fly home to their roosts at night, while mobbing flocks occur when the birds band together to ward off predators like falcons or foxes. Ouellette and his collaborators recorded 16 flocks and identified two different varieties. Hangjian Ling et al./Nature Communications Another set of rules will produce a swarming pattern, and so forth. By introducing a few simple rules regarding interactions between dots, a flocking pattern will emerge once the dots get dense enough. But in the 1980s, a computer graphics specialist named Craig Reynolds developed the so-called "boids" program, an agent-based computational model that has dominated collective behavior studies ever since. In such a model, each individual unit in a swarm is a dot moving in a straight line a constant speed. Research into swarming and flocking was largely relegated to observational biologists for decades. Ouellette himself is careful to distinguish between "flocking" and swarming," although the terms are often used interchangeably. For him, "flocking" pertains to net ordered motion, while "swarming" applies to collective motion that lacks net overall order. The sticking point is that despite the ubiquity of flocking and swarming in nature, each species flocks or swarms a little bit differently in terms of the underlying mechanisms at work. He thought there must be underlying mechanisms behind the formation of those patterns-possibly even a set of universal laws that could apply to collective behavior across different species. This could one day lead to the development of autonomous robotic swarms capable of changing their interaction rules to perform different tasks in response to environmental cues.Ĭo-author Nicholas Ouellette (no relation), a physicist-turned-environmental engineer at Stanford University, has long been fascinated by biological swarms after noting how flocks of starlings in flight formed unusual patterns that, to his physicist's eye, looked a lot like turbulence. ![]() The work builds upon earlier findings published in a November 2019 paper in Nature Communications. Today: why flocks of jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost, or banding together to drive away predators.įlocks of wild jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost or banding together to drive away predators, according to research originally slated to be presented at the 2020 APS March Meeting, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |