Mar 18
You’ve seen the videos — thousands of starlings flocking in the sky to swirl and surge across wide, cloudless backdrops. The beauty of their coordinated motion is stunning. The phenomenon is expressively called murmuration.
There might be purpose to starling choreographies, but if so, it is movement without destination. The flock shapes and re-shapes itself continuously. Doing so makes preying on the flock difficult, but beyond that, the motivation of these group flights is ineffable. If ornithologists told us that starlings were imitating the group behavior endemic to tech-adoption culture, it would be easy to see the similarity. The science behind murmuration extends the analogy even further.
