Fri August 17, 2012 Swarming Up A Storm: Why Animals School And
Flock Originally published on Fri August 17, 2012 11:06 am By
tricking live fish into attacking computer-generated "prey,"
scientists have learned that animals like birds and fish may
indeed have evolved to swarm together to protect themselves from
the threat of predators. "Effectively, what we're doing here is
we're getting predatory fish to play a video game," says Iain
Couzin, who studies collective animal behavior at Princeton
University. "And through playing that game, through seeing which
virtual prey items they attack, we can get a very deep
understanding of as to how behavioral interactions among prey
affect their survival." It has long been assumed that the
schooling behavior of fish and the flocking behavior of birds
evolved in part because it helps protect individuals from being
attacked by predators, says Couzin. "But in actual fact there is
surprisingly little direct evidence." That's because it's been
hard to come up with experiment