For many, social networks are essential in their life. Where to go out, what to do, how to look for work, etc. are some of the decisions in which our friends and acquaintances influence our decisions. Now an international team of researchers has shown that locust swarms are created using the same kinds of social media that humans embrace.
With the arrival in our lives of the famous Facebook and Twitter, no one is able to deny the importance of social networks. However, the importance of these social networks in nature is being studied in various countries to explain the behaviors of animals. Now a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and an American scientist from the National Science Foundation have developed a study that has shown the importance of social media for lobsters.
His analysis was based on previous studies on opinion formation on social media. Applying these ideas to a group of 120 lobster nymphs in the laboratory, the scientists showed that the decisions made are highly influenced by the decisions of friends and contacts on the social network. Thus, by explicitly simulating the locusts’ social network, the researchers realized that the most important component necessary to reproduce the movements observed in the laboratory are the social interactions that occur when some locusts determine the direction of the entire movement. group convincing the rest that they should move in that direction.
We let ourselves be influenced …
As one of the authors of the study, Gerd Zschaler, explains, “the mechanism by which lobsters agree when they move together is the same one that 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. “
In the case of lobsters, their social behavior is extremely important for their survival. Its cannibalistic nature and its way of moving around and causing pests in its path make the swarm a basic element for survival and development.
