Fireflies
https://www.edge.org/conversation/steven_strogatz-who-cares-about-fireflies
Cornell posted to their Facebook page a video depicting professor Steven Strogatz describing surprisingly intelligent behavior of fireflies in the wild. As described further in the article, fireflies found in nature can be observed forming large groups which flash their light-emitting abdomens in perfect synchrony with each other. This observation is quite unexpected as fireflies themselves are not nearly intelligent enough to communicate and formalize a method for synchronous flashing in a large group. However, researchers found that after releasing previously-separate fireflies into a room together, they tend to form clumps with similarly-timed flashings. This seems to indicate that fireflies can adjust their own flash frequency and phase offset based on that of their neighbors.
The fireflies’ convergence to a single flashing pattern is analogous to many types of networks. Two nearby fireflies in a group may be classified as “connected” in a network as the flashing of one firefly is more likely to align to the flashing of a nearby firefly than to that of a further-away firefly. Similarly, in a swarm, a single firefly is likely to be surrounded by multiple other fireflies, which effectively brings it into a highly-connected state. In class, we discussed how a highly-connected network, such as the Facebook friends network, is likely to contain most individuals in the network in one giant connected network; most people on Facebook have a friends-with-friends chain of some length with almost everybody else on Facebook. Likewise, fireflies in a large cluster are likely all connected together by their adjacent flashing, and thus a single, synchronous flashing pattern emerges.
As described in the article, synchronization through networking can appear in other relevant aspects of life. Heart cells, for example, are responsible for pulsating at the same time to pump blood, so they must form a cell network to synchronize their movement over. Additionally, GPS satellites must synchronize an extremely precise record of the current time to accurately determine positions, and this is accomplished through remote networking. Furthermore, as described in a previous blog post, future self-driving cars should synchronize their behavior locally along a network to optimally recovery from nearby accidents to avoid further traffic or collisions. Through nature and technology, synchronization through networking plays a fundamental role in our existence.