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This time it’s not about counting them to fall asleep, but about observing one bizarre habit. Let’s talk about flock of sheep of a breeding farm Mongoliathat it has been moving neatly and incessantly in a circle for several days now. The video of them performing this mysterious “collective dance” first appeared on Wednesday November 16th on the profile Twitter of the Chinese newspaper People’s daily. Despite the various hypothesis that were made, the it causes of this particular phenomenon at the moment it is not known.
Instead, thanks to one study published last October on Nature Physics and signed by three French researchers, we continue to discover fascinating new details on collective behaviors of animals that live in groups, in particular with regards to flocks of sheep.
The “phases” in a flock
Who said that “being a sheep” means passively complying with the will of the flock? The three French researchers started from the observation that the collective movement of these gregarious animals is not a continuous process but, rather, intermittent. They then focused on studying the whole process as sum of the “collective phases” of which it is composed and which are defined by the presence or absence of movement. “From this perspective, questions about information sharing mechanisms and consensus-based decision-making take on a new dimension”, he has declared Fernando Peruani, one of the authors of the research. The study, we remember, it didn’t concern the bizarre “perpetual roundabout” of the flock found in Mongoliaand its publication is prior to the specific case being talked about in the newspapers today.
The researchers first observed the behavior of small flocks of sheep and later they conceived a computational model that was in agreement with the observations made. The conclusions of the study would suggest that sheep move following a leader which remains so only for a certain time period of timeafter which group control would come transferred to another individual of the herd. “If a temporal leader owns knowledge relevant to the group (for example, the way out of a maze or the location of a food source), then the temporal leader will be able to effectively lead the group – explained Peruani – So, all group members benefit from this knowledge. It’s worth noting that this only works if all individuals follow the temporal leader without question.” The authors talk about “collective intelligence”, which the herd would be able to achieve thanks to this type of behavior.
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