Many people know that birds use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate. It’s called magnetoreception. However, birds’ relationship to magnets might run even deeper as a new study shows. Consider the European starling. It is a small black bird known for its wide range of calls, iridescent feathers, and the massive flocks in which it flies. If you’ve ever seen a flock of starlings in flight, it can be quite a spectacle. Thousands upon thousands of these little birds create what looks like a giant black cloud and, even more impressive, seem to fly as one cohesive unit. When a group of starlings gather en masse, it’s called a murmuration. Some murmurations can include more than 60,000 individual birds! Watching them fly can be a mesmerizing experience as every bird seems to know the exact movement of its neighbors, leading to the entire flock acting as if it had one mind. This action is called motility and it’s not unique to starlings. Other species of birds like the red-billed quelea (the most abundant bird in the world), locusts, schools of fish, and even human cells all use motility to create one unit out of thousands of parts. The Science Behind It How exactly this is achieved has always been something of a mystery to scientists, but new findings at Imperial College London suggest the answer might come from a familiar source: magnets. Starling murmurations or human cells are considered active fluid models while magnets fall under the physical models category. Yet, as leading researcher Dr. Chiu Fan Lee explains, physical models might shed some light on how active fluid models function. The movement and direction of magnetic fields is governed by the arrangement and directions of electrons. This is what the magnets are attracted to. The same could be said for starlings in pursuit of flying insects--they are actually attracted to them. Dr. Lee and his team drew these parallels using the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation. The equation essentially accounts for the way in which magnets move. Dr. Lee suggests that this formula can be applied to active fluid models in the same way it is used with physical models. The ramifications are many. If this research holds up, it could have numerous impacts of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and zoology.