This is something I’ve always wondered. They always look so synchronized as if they can read each other’s mind! I’d love an explanation for this.
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From what I recall, for some kinds of fish, they each follow one buddy really closely and respond to that one fish. In the school, there’s a combination of overlap where several fish might be following the same one or one fish following one fish, who is also following one fish.
But when you scale up all the individual movements of the fish to the entire group, it looks like a synchronized or choreographed movement, but that’s really an illusion, they’re each just doing their own thing. Their thing just happens to be exactly what everyone else is doing.
This is something known as “emergent behavior” where a couple simple rules create something approaching complex intelligence. For instance here are a couple simple rules to model flock behavior
1) keep x distance from your neighbor to not crash into them
2) align your direction of flight and match the speed with your neighbor unless that violates rule 1
3) always try to be surrounded by the most individuals possible unless that violates rules 1 or 2
If you input these rules into a computer simulation you can model real life swarm behavior. It’s called a “boids” simulation. You’ll notice that there is no accounting for the overall behavior of the swarm. Each individual only needs to know the behavior of its immediate behaviors. Then small individual decisions within the rules can create really complex movements of the overall flocks as they all respond to the actions of their neighbors.
They sense disturbances in the force. No really. Fish have a literal extra sensory organ on the side of their body called the ‘lateral line’ which makes them feel movement and tiny vibrations and waves and stuff. They feel the ebb and flow of the school and follow it instinctively. That’s how you have a relatively retarded animal like a fish show emergent (seemingly) complex behaviours.
Birds on the other hand have complex formations and rules that they follow in order to function as a flock. I am not sure if the behaviour is learned or somewhat instinctual or somewhere in between, or if we (humanity) have an answer to this yet. We need like a birdologist for that. (I know it’s an ornithologist, am literally greek, let me yoke)
It’s pure reflexes. Each fish or bird follows the one directly in front of them and they
In the case of a V formation, they all just keep the next bird in the corner of their periphery. Since they all pretty much identical peripheral vision, they all are pretty much a uniform length from eachother.
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