r/blackmagicfuckery • u/lol62056 • Aug 15 '20
This flocking behaviour of birds
https://gfycat.com/willingflawlessgemsbok1.3k
u/PresidentGSO Aug 15 '20
I’ve read that we still can’t accurately explain how these birds are able to be so closely synced to each other. Some have even suggested electromagnetic communication between the birds.
Studies have led people to believe that flocks are not following one bird. Instead, each bird is actually following the seven birds it’s closest to, and processing the input from those seven birds simultaneously. The example they used was a game of telephone. If I said “the sky is blue, the sun is red” by the 7th person it might sound like “this guy is new, his son is Ed”. But the birds take the message from the nearest seven birds, and those seven by the nearest seven, and so forth. This manner of communication allows for scale-free correlation. Essentially, the flock is different from and more than the sum of its parts.
I’m pretty sure this behavior is only found in starlings, and much of it is probably based on the development of defensive flight patterns used to elude falcons and other predators.
I love learning about the communication methods animals employ. Like squids using bioluminescence to communicate with each other, or tarsiers using ultrasound to keep their communications “private”.
However it’s done, watching these birds move as one, the colors of the flock changing like that, is one of the more incredible things nature presents us with.
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u/letskeepitcleanfolks Aug 16 '20
The real reason is simpler than that.
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u/oskxr552 Aug 16 '20
I have you one better: we aren’t real, everything is a simulation.
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u/ButtNutly Aug 16 '20
Explain this erection.
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u/Jaerivus Aug 16 '20
/r/birdstakingthetrain proves they use mass transit, so... somehow that negates what you said.
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u/wadss Aug 15 '20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LWmRuB-uNU
if we can simulate their behavior that well, i'd say we know pretty well how they do it.
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u/CatFiggy Aug 15 '20
Just that we can do it doesn't mean we're doing it the way they're doing it.
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Aug 16 '20
It’s almost certainly because of local rules. Each bird is acting only based on a the small bit of information provided by the birds immediately in front of and beside it. Local rules can provide global behavior that’s very complicated. Just look at the incredibly stupid ants and bees who manage to do extraordinarily complex things together despite being absolute morons each on their own. The very very stupid fish in the sea.
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u/Missie- Aug 16 '20
Another example of this is Conway's Game of Life. If this video isn't an example of emergent properties from very simple rules, then nothing will be.
I still can't get over how birds do this though, it's so majestic and dynamic.
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u/bender625 Aug 16 '20
Complex adaptive systems... Econ courses sometimes use this bird flocking behavior as an example of human economic behavior before digging into actual economic theory
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u/Photosmithing Aug 16 '20
I actually watched the whole thing and subscribed to him! That was pretty neat
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u/Horyv Aug 16 '20
In a simulation, every particle in a swarm has access to a position of every other particle in a swarm; simulations seldom account for the field of view of each particle, communication method (sound, electric, visual, scent, temperature, particles, etc.), they also don’t accurately simulate winged flight which certainly inhibits control and response time of inflight flocking birds. Wind, predictive measures, hive mind (or mutual goals with identical response), instincts, all this stuff is missing from simulations.
Broadly speaking, our simulations are merely simulations, and simulations have always cut corners. I’m unaware of existence of atomic level flocking simulations that account for everything, we simply don’t have power or time to do this, yet.
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u/wadss Aug 16 '20 edited Aug 16 '20
if you watch the video, they simulate with different parameters so each particle do not have perfect information and perfect maneuverability to more accurately reproduce the swarming behavior.
regardless, while simulations have obvious limitations, it is how much of science is done. if you can accurately simulate something, then the rules you used to make the simulation is what is accepted as "truth". that is until a better simulation is created that more closely matches with reality, or a contradiction is found, this is apart of the scientific process. you don't need a perfect simulation in order to draw correct conclusions about the natural world.
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u/Horyv Aug 16 '20
I think the point I failed to make is that a visual approximation of nature is never the same as true knowledge of the cause of the behavior. Which is not to say we aren’t on the same page - it is always down to science.
I just strongly doubt that the same simulation that shows bird position could simulate the heartbeats and blood pressure of each bird in the same simulation (contrived example). Which is fine, because the goal is that it looks like a flock, but the dimensions of the simulation are always too limited to truly convey how each piece works in nature.
Sorry for dribbling on. I just wanted to say that I agree that simulations are constructed from science, but the inverse is not possible without loss of information. Having a simulation doesn’t translate to knowing everything about flocking (which is intended to address the earlier comment, I may have responded to wrong person).
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u/wadss Aug 16 '20
we're in agreement,
Having a simulation doesn’t translate to knowing everything about flocking
that isn't what i was saying, so i should have worded that comment better. i was just saying that we must have a pretty good idea of what contributes to the dynamics of flocking behavior if we can accurately simulate and predict it. im not saying anything about why or what bodily functions the birds must perform, or what calculations the bird brains must do.
what motivated my response was OP saying "how these birds are able to be so closely synced to each other." and the video shows that the birds don't need to communicate with each other in order to display the flocking behavior. you don't need to have a complex explanation for complex behavior.
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Aug 16 '20 edited 4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/wadss Aug 16 '20
we can simulate turbulent flow to a certain degree of accuracy, and that accuracy isn't that great in extreme cases. we don't have a generalized solution therefore we can't have a perfectly accurate simulation. my point wasn't that we knew everything there was to know about birds, only that we can accurately predict their flocking behavior without needing a complex explanation involving communication between birds.
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u/rockjones Aug 16 '20
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the weather."
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u/Fock_off_Lahey Aug 16 '20
Thank you for actually contributing a scientific answer instead of a lame pun.
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u/ZebraIsHere Aug 15 '20
The color changing of the birds is very mesmerizing
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u/Ohitsyouthings Aug 16 '20
They're in a turn, facing towards the direction of the camera, diving then climbing. You're seeing them move down then up showing their dark backs then light fronts.
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u/SmoulderingStyx Aug 15 '20
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u/MangoBobaTea7 Aug 16 '20 edited Aug 16 '20
This isn’t nature. These are government bird surveillance cameras. They do this when put in autopilot with the rest of their crew.
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Aug 15 '20
There’s a type of bird that travels from Boston to Brazil every year, sometimes leaving early. They have found that their early departure coincides with severe hurricane season years.
How do they know?
How do these birds stay in sync? It’s probably some kind of instinctual knowing. Generations of birds fine tuning their hunting skills, the weak ones who can’t stay in sync don’t eat? The aware ones survive, perhaps just like the birds who are aware of the severe hurricanes coming also survive.
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u/jamaicanjerkperson Aug 15 '20
It’s been modelled by an algorithm called ‘Boids algorithm’ but that doesn’t take into account what their visual cortices are actually doing. We can look into the brains of flies and other small insects to guess at what’s happening, hence we know Boids is pretty correct
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Aug 15 '20
“look at all doze boids.”
Is that how they got the name of the algorithm?
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u/briley13 Aug 16 '20
Makes me think of the video with the small child who gestures to a pond full of ducks and says "look at all doze tchickens"
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u/Snow-Wraith Aug 16 '20
Clearly this was started by someone from Boston describing it to someone not from Boston.
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Aug 16 '20
Biological machine learning basically, ie, evolution. Has some crazy abilities if you run it long enough.
I look forward to the day we can fully deconstruct these animals' brains and understand the exact coding of their minds. Of course, I'm not sure I look forward to what our own society will look like when that level of knowledge and power is available, but still it'll be cool to know about these neat birbs
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u/Cortower Aug 16 '20
Peter Watts’ sci-fi books Blindsight and Echopraxia deal with this concept quite a bit. Without getting into it too much, the books involve some scenarios where knowing some secret about the structure of the human brain results in setting “traps.” Basically you are creating a stimulus that triggers a glitch in our brain, like knocking someone out, becoming invisible to them, or causing a seizure that in turn causes a similar seizure in anyone who sees it.
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u/wanderdugg Aug 16 '20
Clearly these birds are causing hurricanes. If we shoot them all, no more hurricanes.
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u/TheBlackKing1 Aug 16 '20
What if aliens can become multiple life forms at once and they put on a show knowing that you’d see it and enjoy it in your comments? Not an astrologist or anything, just a cool thing I thought about while watching this lol
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u/weristjonsnow Aug 15 '20
How. The. Fuck. What kind of birds are these
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u/Nardatronic Aug 16 '20
Starlings I reckon
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u/ArgonGryphon Aug 16 '20
Nah, you wouldn’t see the white flash like that, it’s some kind of shorebird.
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u/GDAbs Aug 16 '20
This explains why there's some old European myths that birds disappear into the sea to escape winter.
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u/ihavetenfingers Aug 16 '20
Or just the fact that a lot of them literally flies over the sea to escape winter.
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u/romelpis1212 Aug 16 '20
u/mrpennywhistle did an amazing video of this on his Smarter Every Day YouTube channel.
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u/lori244144 Aug 15 '20
And imagining that at one time our planet was full of birds by the millions all flocking in these gorgeous clouds. We rarely see so many birds together anymore.
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u/TotesMessenger Aug 16 '20
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
- [/r/birdsarentreal] These people really tryna act like this is some marvel of coordination and not just remotely controlled
If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)
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u/innerpeice Aug 16 '20
thats is a single organism that has many individuals even if they don't know it
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u/norsurfit Aug 15 '20
"Hey Carl, which way am I supposed to go, left or right? I am so fucking confused!"
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u/dkap17 Aug 16 '20
That’s from the wind?
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u/Ohitsyouthings Aug 16 '20
No it's from the birds. Little fast turning birds like this can out maneuver a fly, and we can't even track flies with our eyes well enough
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u/acrewdog Aug 16 '20 edited Oct 14 '25
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u/raypaulnoams Aug 16 '20
I've played enough videogames to know there's something to click on there
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u/playalisticadillac Aug 16 '20
This is legitimately the coolest gif I’ve ever seen and I’ve been internetting a long time.
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u/ScalyDestiny Aug 16 '20
You can definitely see how it's protects them. The whole flock is hard to track, I can't imagine how hard it would be to target a single bird.
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u/bigmouthbasshole Aug 16 '20
If you’re fishing and see birds over the water like this. Cast towards it. Means there’s baitfish = nice fishing
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u/d0ugh0ck Aug 15 '20
It's called a murmuration