Swarms of locusts use social networking to communicate [IOP]

The next competitive frontier for Facebook and Google (via ACM TechNews)…

The researchers state that it may not be obvious that animals are creating the equivalent of our human social networks however this is the precise mechanism behind swarming transition.

One of the study’s authors,  Gerd Zschaler, said, “We concluded that the mechanism through which locusts agree on a direction to move together (sometimes with devastating consequences, such as locust plagues) is the same we sometimes use to decide where to live or where to go out: we let ourselves be convinced by those in our social network, often by those going in the opposite direction.”

Swarms of locusts use social networking to communicate