page_title: Swarm behaviour
section_title: Mammals
hierarchical_section_title: Swarm behaviour / Biological swarming / Mammals
caption_attribution_description: A Border Collie at the sheepdog trials at Rural Hill Farm in Huntersville, North Carolina.Sheepdog Trials
context_page_description: Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. It is a highly interdisciplinary topic. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other entity or animal that exhibits swarm behaviour. The term flocking or murmuration can refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds, herding to refer to swarm behaviour in tetrapods, and shoaling or schooling to refer to swarm behaviour in fish. Phytoplankton also gather in huge swarms called blooms, although these organisms are algae and are not self-propelled the way animals are. By extension, the term "swarm" is applied also to inanimate entities which exhibit parallel behaviours, as in a robot swarm, an earthquake swarm, or a swarm of stars.
  From a more abstract point of view, swarm behaviour is the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities.
context_section_description: Parrish JK, Edelstein-Keshet L (1999). "Complexity, pattern and evolutionary trade-offs in animal aggregation" (PDF). Science. 284 (5411): 99–101. Bibcode:1999Sci...284...99P. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.560.5229. doi:10.1126/science.284.5411.99. PMID 10102827. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-20.
caption: Sheep dogs (here a Border Collie) control the flocking behaviour of sheep.
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2007:11:04 11:45:10", "Image ExifOffset": "167", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/800", "EXIF FNumber": "63/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:11:04 11:45:10", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:11:04 11:45:10", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5497/570", "EXIF ApertureValue": "2581/486", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Partial", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "200", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1733", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "818", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "118627/30", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "150433/38", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}