Synchronicity, not the album by the Police, but rather synchronicity generated by fireflies happens when males, wanting to hook up with females, begin the process by sending cascading waves of flashes through a swarm at the point it becomes dense enough for the males to do their thing.
Swarms of synchronous fireflies are rather like melting ice, or at least that’s how Raphael Sarfati, a physicist, sees it. Ice remains solid until it warms to a certain temperature and becomes a liquid. Likewise, a loose swarm fireflies will flash the lanterns in their abdomens randomly. But when the swarm reaches a certain density, the fireflies begin to blink in unison.
“Above that threshold, it is almost perfect synchronization,” with rhythmic, coordinated waves of light, said Dr. Sarfati, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
It's not just fireflies ...
The 3-D reconstruction allowed the researchers to characterize several complex patterns in the swarm’s behavior. The male fireflies did not flash instantaneously, but rather in a cascading wave across the swarm. For example, sometimes the flashes would begin at the bottom of the ridge and move toward the insects at the top. This relay-like propagation of flashing suggests that fireflies interact with the swarm locally, taking their cues from the fireflies around them, Dr. Peleg said.
This propagation pattern is also found in other animal swarms such as schools of fish, she added, where local interactions between fish can ripple out to the entire group.
“I see my neighbor is flashing, so I flash as well,” Dr. Sarfati explained.
Fireflies caught in the act in the daytime. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment