But remember, in such situations, if you leave the swarm you get eaten, if you stay in the swarm every other "swarmer" tries to eat you while you are trying to eat the swarmer ahead of you. It's a rather "perfect" society, when you come to think of it. Maybe it is in fact a utopian goal of some of our more vicious rulers. Of course, as long at they themselves can be insulated from swarm behavior. Swarm behavior is meant only for the mob, and not for the truly intelligent people. But once a swarm gets started, it is not possible to control it.
Jerry Monaco
*Iain Couzin:* We studied swarming crickets in the southern United States called the Mormon cricket, and these Mormon crickets are large, black creatures that form really dense swarms, marching along the ground, it's a fantastic sight. And they can even form slicks on roads because their density is so high, so they are dangerous to drivers in the area. And what we were interested in is why are these insects doing this? It looks like a strongly coordinated behaviour, that they're all in agreement that they should be moving in one direction. But again, our knowledge of collective behaviour means we have to always look a bit deeper, and there can sometimes be intriguing and simpler explanations. In this case that's exactly what we found. Going out there to Utah, looking at these crickets we found that they would eat road kills, for example, rabbits. They'd been gnawing the ears down, crawling in through the mouth, crawling in through the eyes and eating the brain, really remarkable stuff. So these vegetarian crickets seem to have a strong fondness for food.
Stephen Simpson at Sydney University has developed artificial diets with
protein and carbohydrate and so on, so we could begin questions about...now,
what do you really like to eat? We found that they strongly preferred
protein to carbohydrate and they really liked salt concentrations at exactly
that concentration of their own blood. ___So what we found that instead of
this being some collective, cooperative behaviour, what we have in fact is a
forced march. Every cricket is trying to eat the one ahead and prevent
itself from being eaten from behind. We found that they were very aggressive
with each other, attacking an immobile insect within 17 seconds and really
jumping on it and biting it. So one may then ask questions; why, if it's so
dangerous to be in a swarm, why don't they leave? But another colleague at
the University of Sydney, Greg Sword, using tiny little radio transmitters
on these crickets found that it's even more dangerous to leave the group
because they get eaten by predators. So really they're making the best of a
rather bad situation.___
>From "The Science Show" @
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1788158.htm
Ian Couzin's webpage http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061215/2a5318ae/attachment.htm>