Birds, fish, and other creatures form amazing, undulating swarms of individuals. How these collectives comes together and move continues to fascinate scientists. Here, researchers look at simple particles with two Keep reading
Tag: collective motion
Schooling Relies on Vision
For fish, collective motions like schooling rely on a few mechanisms, including flow sensing and — as beautifully demonstrated in this experiment — vision. Researchers used an infrared camera to Keep reading
Starlings Over Rome
Each winter millions of starlings migrate to Rome, where they form enormous murmurations in the sky above. The ephemeral and amorphous displays are driven by each bird responding to its Keep reading
Aerial Sheep Flow
I may never get tired of drone videos of sheep herding. They are mesmerizing to watch and full of so many characteristics of flow. Like a compressible fluid, the herd Keep reading
Collective Motion in Grains
Flocks of birds and schools of fish swarm in complicated collective motions, but groups of non-living components can move collectively, too. In this Lutetium Project video, we learn about grains Keep reading
The Fluidity of Worm Blobs
The aquatic blackworm forms blobs composed of thousands of individual worms for protection against evaporation, light, and heat. The worms braid themselves together (Image 1). Once a blob forms, it Keep reading
Bacterial Turbulence
Conventional fluid dynamical wisdom posits that any flows at the microscale should be laminar. Tiny swimmers like microorganisms live in a world dominated by viscosity, therefore, there can be no Keep reading
Hydrodynamics of Sheep
As we’ve discussed previously, not all fluid-like behavior occurs within a literal fluid. Many groups of organisms — humans included — behave like a fluid en masse. Herds of sheep Keep reading
Collective Catfish Convection
Gather many birds, fish, or humans together and you often get collective motion that’s remarkably fluid-like in appearance. This video shows a group of juvenile striped eel catfish, an (eventually) Keep reading
Crowds as a Fluid
At a low density, crowds of people can behave like a fluid, which has led to numerous hydrodynamically-based crowd models. At higher densities, though, crowds are more like a soft solid, Keep reading