At the beach I ran into a cloud of gnats…

… and maybe you have as well. Annoying, amirite?

One of the defining features of SRS is a deep curiosity about things that you find, or in this case, you stumble into while on walkabout. I grabbed this short video because I could actually see the gnats against the darker rock in the shadow. They seemed to form an almost stationary cloud over this brighter patch of rock.

I stood there for several minutes watching the cloud swirl around almost like a tiny murmuration of starlings. I’m sure other people walking on the beach thought I was daft, staring at something they couldn’t see, moving my hand slowly to see if they’d move out of the way. (Answer: they’d dodge my hand, but the mass of gnats stayed hovering over the same place.)

When I find something like this, I get curious and starting asking myself some basic questions: Why? How? What-for?

And then I usually head home and search for deeper answers to the questions that rise to the surface. (And if it’s a really interesting thing I see, I write down the questions for later research. As someone once said, “the most profound misunderstanding of human memory is that you’ll remember that later…”)

So my Challenge for you, after my beach walk is this:

1. Why do gnats and starlings murmurate? (Is that even the right language to use?) What’s a good search strategy to find the answer? Do they murmurate for the same reason?

It’s a great, curious thing to see beautiful behaviors in the world and try to understand them. Tell us what you did to understand these behaviors. Let us know in the comments below, won’t you?

Search on!