Talk:Swarm behaviour

message: -I like.... TOTALLY AGREE! Fishies! Weee Alexbuirds 22:43, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  I like the little .gif videos.  Let's get more of those on Wikipedia. 

message: The "swarming" of microorganisms is not general knowledge and requires verification.  SmokeyJoe 00:57, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:   Microorganisms 

message: Unless there are objections, I propose splitting out the section called Fish into an article of its own called Shoaling. The main article will then have a truncated section on shoaling, referring to the separate article. Shoaling is an important topic in Fisheries, and needs its own article. The current article details only shoaling behaviour, and has a lot of scope for expansion. --Geronimo20 (talk) 03:31, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Shoaling as an article in its own right

message: How is swaming behavior different from flocking behavior?  If they are sufficiently similar, I would advocate combining the articles.  If not, then I think a section is in order which can point out the similarities and differences.
--1000Faces (talk) 07:37, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "Swarming" is a general term that can be applied to any animal that swarms. "Flocking" refers to swarming behaviour in birds only, just as "shoaling" refers to swarming behaviour in fish only. --Geronimo20 (talk) 21:30, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flocking behavior? 

message: There is zero reason for having a quote section about this. Any viable information should be incorporated into the general description and not seperated into a quote section. What's next? Swarm trivia? 72.221.114.113 (talk) 04:01, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotes 

message: Your recent edits seem almost a little harsh in relation to the previous formulation. It is now all lumped together without the earlier distinctions. The delineations seemed appropriate as written. Are you trying to be more concise? Please remember that Wikipedia has no admonition against or aversion to prosaically styled articles. Yet, I suppose that if one feels an economy of words is best, I'll not challenge it further. Perhaps we can find a way to meet both standards. Dr. Dan (talk) 04:43, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I was not so much concerned with economy (though I think economy is generally a good idea) but rather with clarity, unity and coherence. I suppose I come from the science side (the article is about biological swarms), with a focus more on what the common underlying dynamics of "swarming" might be.  I see you are maybe coming more from a historian sensibility. I don't see my rewrite of the lead lost distinctions or delineations, but if you  feel differently then change it. I likewise won't challenge it further. Either way, the article is raw, and still needs a lot more work. Perhaps you might like to add a section on "people swarms"? --Geronimo20 (talk) 05:37, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I was coming a little more from a sociological or even, odd as it may sound, literary perspective, rather than a historical one. You're right, the article needs more work. As for "people swarms", recently, I'm perpetually engaged with them. Maybe I should work on that section. Dr. Dan (talk) 06:09, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  To Geronimo20 

message: please see this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_animal_behavior_and_brain_behavior
it is yet not very articulated article Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Collective_animal_behavior  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Scienficreal (talk • contribs) 21:55, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collective animal behavior and brain behavior 

message: An image used in this article, , has been nominated for deletion at Wikimedia Commons in the following category: Deletion requests December 2011 
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thread_title: File:Pyranha Pygocentrus piraya group 1280 boosted.jpg Nominated for Deletion

message: Perhaps the fact that some animals are prepared to follow a robotic leader can be mentioned. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120301113345.htm Also, I think the same can be done with birds, ie by using artificial birds (ie Robert Musters' peregrine falcon, BlueFalcon design, ...) The only thing with this may be the control/range. Given that male/female birds of any size can be made of that exact species, and given that several birds for guiding a single flock can be produced, success rates should be higher than ie having the birds follow an aircraft (as done in William Lishman's projects)
For the control: rather than using remote control (R/C), it's best to make it autonomous (else the artificial bird can not fly very far before going out of range of the radio communication), so basically a "robot". A simple one should be relatively easy to do. A more advanced one (which also incorporates variables which birds take into account, ie windspeed/altitude, swarm movement, ... may be more difficult but I guess that this too is still achievable. Perhaps it can be made based on software as ArduPilot.
An other thing is the energy storage; I think it's probably best to use a miniature internal combustion engine rather than electric batteries (this also allows quick refilling when the birds stop to rest). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-controlled_car#Nitro-powered_models
91.182.116.161 (talk) 08:29, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Living animals following a robotic leader

message: Please recognize that this screensaver is freeware -- I'm not making any money out of it. Some nazi removed the link. I think the link is fully appropriate here, as the page is taking about self propelled particles and this is exactly what the screensaver is showing -- a mesmerizing picture of chaos resulting out of nonlinear mathematics.ExcessPhase (talk) 18:50, 7 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This screensaver does not meet the inclusion requirements for WP:EL; it falls under "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article." and "Sites that are only indirectly related to the article's subject: the link should be directly related to the subject of the article." Furthermore, calling the user who removed the link a Nazi is highly inappropriate and incivil. Your behavior here is becoming more and more questionable; I'd suggest you step back a bit and read our civility guidelines. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 18:55, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

text: The Wolfram-Alpha links at the bottom of the page allow for this. Furthermore, as I said in my response on my talk page, there is not a single author of this article. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 19:11, 7 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  link to my screensaver was removed 

message: Under bird migration, I encountered the following text:
"Many, if not most, birds migrate in flocks. For larger birds, flying in flocks reduces energy costs. Flocks of birds save energy when flying together much in the way that bicyclists draft one another in a peloton."
There were two points to be made here. First is that reduction of the energy costs as a reason for formation flight is a claim, not a fact. The scientific debate about this is still going on. It is mostly a matter of popular belief that birds fly in formation to reduce their costs. Second is that the comparison with a peloton of cyclists doesn't make any sense at all. So I corrected the text to read:
"Many, if not most, birds migrate in flocks. For larger birds, it is assumed that flying in flocks reduces energy costs."
In the edit summary I explained: Nonsense: a peloton propels itself through friction with the ground, so breaking the air makes sense; the only head wind a bird has is its own forward velocity; it can't break that. My edit was reverted by Epipelagic on the ground of: "You haven't thought this through". I'm convinced the user or author who made the comparison with a peloton of cyclists hasn't thought this through. I'll give more ample explanation for both corrections:
There are several papers on energy savings for birds flying in formation, most notably Wieselsberger (1914) and Lissaman & Shollenberger (1970). Wieselsberger however used the unrealistic model of potential flow to calculate the benefits for every single bird in a v-formation. Potential flow is flow without viscosity. The model is too far away from reality to give reasonable results here. Lissaman & Shollenberger claim they did some calculations on formations of birds of up to 25 individuals. They did not however, reveal their method of calculation. What they state about energetic benefits is thus no more than a claim. Several authors have since questioned the claim, and given other explanations for formation flight. Among them Gould & Heppner (1974), Higdon & Corrsin (1978), Badgerow & Hainsworth (1981) and Heppner et al. (1985). Although new claims on energy savings have been published, this time based on experimental work on birds, e.g. Portugal et al. (2014) and Völkl et al. (2015), there is also the work of Usherwood et al. (2011), stating there are actual higher costs for birds flying in a flock. Remember the energetic benefits are hypothesized for highly ordered v-formations, and this Wikipedia-article is about swarming.
Now let's rethink the comparison of a flock of birds with a peloton of cyclists. A cyclist propels himself by friction with the ground. He then gets a certain speed with respect to the ground. The surrounding air also has a speed with respect to the ground. The sum of those two speeds is the wind a cyclist experiences. It can be a headwind, a tailwind, a sidewind or a combination. For the cyclist, anything with a headwind component is an inconvenience. It helps a lot if another cyclist rides in front of him, breaking or even blocking the headwind. A bird, on the other hand, is completely surrounded by the air. It makes no contact with the ground. If the air moves, the bird moves with it. If two birds fly in moving air, they both move with it at the speed of the air. In order to stay aloft, a bird needs to have some speed with respect to the air, so it propels itself forward. It needs this flow over its wings in order to produce lift. The only wind a bird experiences, is its own forward velocity with respect to the surrounding air. A bird always has headwind, unless it's a hovering bird, like a humming bird, in which case it creates a top down flow. Take away the flow, and the bird will plummet. You cannot, moreover, break or block the wind for a bird if you're in the same air yourself. The comparison with a cyclist is total nonsense. If the comparison with a peloton has to be reintroduced, it has to be done on the basis of a serious scientific paper, making this comparison. Otherwise it's Original Research, and should be removed right away. I predict there are no books or papers on the dynamics of flight in which the comparison is to be found. 129.125.142.151 (talk) 12:24, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pointless comparison  of formation flight  with  a  peloton of cyclists 

message: Robert McNeill Alexander's article "Hitching a lift hydrodynamically - in swimming, flying and cycling" (J. Biol. 2004) was cited as a reference for the energetic benefits of flying in a flock. McNeill Alexander is one of the godfathers of animal mechanics. He is certainly an authority on animal locomotion, like the mechanics of dinosaur locomotion. When it comes to fluid dynamics and theory of flight however, the guy hasn't got a clue. This is shown very clearly in the third paragraph of the introduction of the cited paper, where it reads: "...Bernoulli's principle. (This is the principle that explains how aircraft can remain airborne: the pressure in the faster-moving air above the wings is less than the pressure in the slower-moving air below them.)" Bernoulli's principle as the basis for lift generated by an airfoil is a common misconception. A very widespread and obstinate one too. You won't find this explanation for lift in any modern treatise on fluid dynamics and the principles of lift and flight, yet McNeill Alexander just perpetuates here what the general public sees as common knowledge but is in fact nonsense. One cannot, for example, explain how airplanes can fly upside down on the basis of Bernoulli's principle. If this were the correct explanation for lift, airplanes flying upside down would fall down at twice the acceleration of gravity, yet they can easily remain airborne, as is shown in nearly every airshow. The leading principle here is of course Newton's third law, which seems to have escaped McNeill Alexander's attention.
Another example of McNeill Alexander's ignorance to fluid dynamics is the treatment, in the cited article, of the diamond shaped order in fish schools. This concept, based on the idea of two adjacent Von Karman vortex streets, produced by two fishes swimming next to each other, giving the one trailing them much of a free ride, was hypothesized on theoretical basis but was actually never found in real fish schools. In a special session of the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology is Salzburg in 2012, the majority of experts on this topic gathered. Not a single one had ever found this configuration in any real school of fishes, no matter how hard they tried to give proof of its existence. Fishes just don't save energy this way.
McNeill Alexander is right when he states, two paragraphs before the end of his paper, that cyclists riding at the back of the pack can save a lot of energy. Fortunately, he doesn't make the comparison with swarming birds or schooling fish, but only with running animals, which makes sense. That's one of the few things in the paper that make sense. The rest is just showing McNeill Alexander doesn't know much about locomotion of animals that are completely surrounded by the medium in which they move and by which they have to propel themselves. I therefore removed this useless reference. 129.125.142.151 (talk) 12:58, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  McNeill Alexander and "Hitching a lift"