Temporary Emergent Leadership

While murmurations lack permanent leaders, temporary leadership occurs. In fish schools and bird flocks, individuals with better information (e.g., a fish that knows where food is, or a bird that spots a predator) can influence neighbors, and this influence propagates. Leadership is informational, not hierarchical - individuals follow neighbors who seem to have useful information. Experiments with golden shiners demonstrate this: researchers trained a few 'informed' fish to associate a specific color with food. When placed in a school with naive fish, the informed fish swam toward the color, naive fish followed, and the school converged on the food source even though most individuals had no direct knowledge. Crucially, leadership is distributed and temporary. Any individual with better information can influence neighbors, and this influence decays once the information is no longer relevant.