Swarm behaviour
Swarm behaviour, or
swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by animals of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving
en masse or migrating in some direction. As a term,
swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other animal that exhibits swarm behaviour. The term
flocking is usually used to refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds,
herding to refer to swarm behaviour in quadrupeds,
shoaling or
schooling to refer to swarm behaviour in fish. Phytoplankton also gather in huge swarms called
blooms, although these organisms are algae and are not self-propelled the way animals are. By extension, the term swarm is applied also to inanimate entities which exhibit parallel behaviours, as in a robot swarm, an earthquake swarm, or a swarm of stars. From a more abstract point of view, swarm behaviour is the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities.