Name: The Math and Mystery of Murmurations
Uploaded: 2021-05-19T09:04:36.000Z
Duration: 3 min 50 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

A bunch of goats is called a herd, whales travel in pods, baboons in troops, and owls

in parliaments, but starlings may have the loveliest grouping of all: murmurations.

Starlings are found all over the world including in North America where they were introduced

in the late 1800s by a misguided Shakespeare fan who wanted to see every bird the bard

ever mentioned flooding about in the New World.

If you've ever been lucky enough to see a group of starlings winging across the Irish

or Iowan sky, you've no doubt appreciated one of nature's most hypnotic sites, the fluid,

Lots of animals move in groups of course, mainly for defensive reasons.

Biologists sometimes call this the selfish herd, as large groups diminish the odds that

the individual gets picked off by a predator.

But murmurations appear to be more complex than that.

Research has found that flocks of starlings respond faster to the presence of a predator,

be it falcon or fox or farmer, the larger the group gets.

The more birds you have together, the more allies you have around you gathering intel,

and the faster evasive action can be taken.

So instead of there being a single leader, or even group of leaders, the entire flock

And when a predator attacks, murmurations often form waves that roll in the opposite

Studies of starlings being hunted by peregrine falcons have shown that these undulations

make the falcons much less successful in their hunts as they get confused and waste a lot

So, how do these coordinated movements work, and why don't the birds crash into each other

I mean imagine a herd of 2,000 humans running around!

Video analysis of murmurations in Rome has shown that every starling in a flock interacts

with a fixed number of birds directly around it, on average six or seven other birds.

This means that they're not connected to the whole flock or even all the birds within a

Instead, they just link up with the next bird over in any direction, no matter how near

And the shape of the flock, rather than the size, has the greatest affect on this number.

Seven seems to be the optimal number for tightly connected flocks that starlings are known

So if each bird's direction and velocity is influenced by the six or seven starlings around

it, and each of those is interacting with a half dozen birds around it, well, when you

scale that out, you begin to see how a murmuration can become so complexly and wonderfully dynamic.

But we still have a lot to learn about how these groups form in the first place and how

Mathematically speaking, a murmuration isn't a bunch of birds so much as it is a tipping

Scientists sometimes describe these points as phase transitions, like when liquids become

gases or metals become magnetized or snowpack lets loose into an avalanche.

In this case, starlings start out as individuals, but moments after a certain number of them

flock together, they're connected into a cohesive unit ready to respond to anything.

We also haven't quite figured out how the birds use their senses and other data to interact

with each other so quickly and precisely.

Biologists have often used the word "mystery" to describe it, and it's a beautiful one at

Thank you for watching this SciShow Dose, especially to our Subbable subscribers.

To learn how you can support us, just go to subbable.com/scishow to learn more.

And be sure to check out our new channel SciShow Space where we'll be exploring phenomena like

white holes and sharing the latest in space news.

If you have any questions, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter and as always in the

And if you want to keep getting smarter with us, just go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe.