The STARFLAG handbook on collective animal behaviour: 1. Empirical methods

The first speculations about collective animal behaviour date back to the observations of Pliny on flocks of starlings (translated by Rackham 1933). His remarks were necessarily qualitative, although reasonable too. Most of the hypotheses formulated almost 2000 years later were based on equally qualitative observations (Selous, 1931 and Emlen, 1952). At times, the study of collective animal behaviour has been complemented by analogies with instances of collective behaviour in other fields of science, prominently physics (Radokov 1973). However, in the absence of any quantitative empirical insight, attempts to address the fundamental issues of collective behaviour rapidly became speculative.