Few things are as fascinating to look at a flock of starlings performing their aerial bird dance that is commonly seen, for example, above the West Pier in Brighton, UK, or in Rome when exiting the main train station, or a school of fish escaping a predator. In order to move together so nicely and to make efficient collective decisions, grouping animals (such as certain birds or fish) interact socially with each other, constantly adjusting their movements in ways that create the choreographies that we find so mesmerizing. These interactions are nothing but many small acts of attraction between distant individuals, repulsion from neighbors that are too close, and alignment among neighbors to coordinate the group’s direction of movement. By examining these motions in more detail, scientists from Science of Intelligence in Berlin and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona found that in fish schools, these interactions are regulated by the relative speeds between neighbors, and that individuals tend to align with the faster ones and ignore the slower ones. The findings were published in a PNAS paper. The bottom line is: swimming faster will get you followers.
