Forms emerging from collective motion

Abstract

From the smallest to the largest scale, and whether they are natural or artificial, groups of organisms move together. Already, Pliny the Elder [10] bequeathed us his fascination with the collective movements of animals. The evening flight of clouds of starlings is one of the most spectacular of these phenomena. Common around the Mediterranean basin in winter, they have inspired countless literary and poetic descriptions [2]. Scientifically, however, these clouds of birds remain as poorly understood as the remarkable stability and sometimes precise internal order of schools of fish, the dynamics of herds of caribou or wildebeest, etc. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.