THE BEAUTY OF SHAPE SHIFTING MURMURATIONS NOW

MURMURATIONS

Beautiful shapes are created and endlessly changed in mid-air when some birds of a feather flock together.

If you’ve ever seen a mass of starling birds fly, soar, swoop, dive, and perform aerial ballet in unison, you’ve seen one of the coolest natural phenomena in the sky. Ornithologists call them “murmurations.”

Hundreds, sometimes thousands of the small birds move in swarms, constantly changing the form and density, a common occurrence, but one that is still somewhat mysterious in nature.

The swarms change shape continuously, from one split second to the next. They flow, like water or smoke. Like clouds, murmurations can appear as familiar shapes, looking like giant dragons or fantastic sea creatures. Their shapes are often abstract and organic.

Starlings can be found flying and swarming in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and Australia.There are nearly 120 species. Murmurations can contain multiple species.

Giant murmurations tend to occur in autumn, so look for them now! Seeing thousands of birds moving in syncopated time and shape, sometimes with subsections splitting off in separate formations only to regroup en masse again, is mesmerizing.

Physicists have observed that murmurations can be described with the same equations phase transitions of matter, for example when a liquid turns to a gas.

But how do the starlings know to keep the shape in unison? How do they know when and where to move? How does  a bird at one edge of the flock know which direction the birds at the opposite edge will fly? And why do these birds synchronize their flight?

The STARFLAG Project consists of a group of European scientists from various different disciplines, including biology, physics, and economics, coming together in order to study collective animal behavior. STARFLAG has recently come together in order to study the starlings as a "paradigm of animal behavior"

In recent years, the STARFLAG project was able to develop an algorithm to explain the shape shifting. The STARFLAG project is now ended, but its research continues in the COBBS lab.

There are several theories about murmurations. Studies have shown that there is safety in numbers. Predators are less successful in their attempts. The murmurations both confuse the hawks and falcons looking for a meal and they physically make it harder to nab an individual starling. But this can’t be the only reason.

Other studies show that large murmurations and other groups respond faster to the presence of predators than do smaller ones. And information is transferred among individuals about things like location of food sources and roosting spots.

Each starling is “connected” to each other startling in its group. Each maintains a set distance apart from each other.

The shapes the murmurations form move in equations of “critical transitions” — systems that shift at tipping points, changing shapes once the current form can no longer exist. But it is still not known how the urgency to change shape is created and maintained.

While starlings are unique in forming murmurations, they aren’t the only birds that flock, of course. But different species’ flying groups have specific names. Finches flock in “charms” and crows flock in “murders,” for example.

It is fascinating to consider that the biological criticality of shape shifting also operates on the molecular level, for example in proteins and neurons -- a seemingly universal principle at play.

Check out this amazing video.

Read more about Beautiful Shapes in Beautiful Shapes Within Shapes Now.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: by ☆e*t*h*e*r*e*a*l☆. “Murmuration.”
2. Image: by James West. “Starling Murmurations at Sunset Over Brighton Pier.”
3. Image: by Adam. “A Murmuration of Starlings.”
4. Image: by Milo Bostock. “Murmuration.”
5. Image: by Airwolfhound. “Starling Murmuration - RSPB Minsmere.”
6. Image: by GrahamC57. “Starling Murmuration!”
7. Image: by John Holmes. “The flock of starlings acting as a swarm.”
8. Image: by Donald Macauley. “Starling Roost.”
9. Image: by Helen Haden. “Leaping over the pier!”
10. Image: by James West. “Starling Murmurations at Sunset.”
11. Image: by Milo Bostock. “Murmuration.”
12. Image: by Donald Macauley. Untitled.
13. Image: by Tom Lee. “Tadpole...?”
14. Image: by Tom Lee. “Cyprus....?”
15. Image: by Laura Thorne. “Murmuration.”
16. Image: by Donald Macauley. Untitled.
17. Image: by Milo Bostock. “Murmuration.”
18. Image: by Sue Cro. “Sunset flight!”
19. Image: by BN App - Download now!
20. Image: by Airwolfhound. “Starling Murmuration - RSPB Minsmere.”