Edward Shen

TL;DR: It is found that information about direction changes propagates across the flock with a linear dispersion law and negligible attenuation, hence minimizing group decoherence and suggesting that swift decision-making may be the adaptive drive for the strong behavioural polarization observed in many living groups.

TL;DR: It is found that correlation increases sharply with the swarm's density, indicating that the interaction between midges is based on a metric perception mechanism, suggesting that correlation, rather than order, is the true hallmark of collective behaviour in biological systems.

TL;DR: By gathering three-dimensional data on swarms of midges in the field, it is found that swarms tune their control parameter and size so as to maintain a scaling behavior of the correlation function, and correlation length and susceptibility scale with the system's size and swarms exhibit a near-maximal degree of correlation at all sizes.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an experimental study of spontaneous collective turns in natural flocks of starlings and find that birds on the edges deviate from the mean direction of motion much more frequently than other individuals, indicating that persistent localized fluctuations are the crucial ingredient for triggering collective directional change.

TL;DR: An experimental study of spontaneous collective turns in natural flocks of starlings using a recently developed tracking algorithm to reconstruct three-dimensional trajectories of each individual bird in the flock for the whole duration of a turning event and revealing the emergent dynamics of turning.