Starling Murmuration. One of Nature’s most astounding phenomenon, is also one of its least understood.
It truly is awe inspiring to watch a murmuration of hundreds if not thousands of starlings move in unison as if it is a single entity, in what seems to be a sporadic change of velocity.
In a recent study of this uncanny phenomenon, scientist have postulated that its underlying mechanism is more closely related to the world of fringe physics than to biology.
The movement of two starlings in the flock seems to be almost simultaneous, even when they are separated by hundreds of other starlings. It almost seems as if the flock behaves as a network in which information travels in no time at all.
According to recent computational modeling , what best describes this is something named scale-free correlation,and is also used to describe the process in which a metal is magnetized, as well as the formation of avalanches.
In other words, it seems that this biological system is poised at criticality, and therefor capable of extremely effective reaction to any perturbations.
The implication of this may be that there are presently unknown universal laws which govern certain biological systems in all sorts of orders of magnitude, from the starlings to neural networks.
Reference:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.2242