Order and chaos
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It's 2010. I'm sitting on a bench in the grounds of the University of Nottingham's Sutton Bonington campus. Alone, quiet, and watching. This is the first day of term. Fresh-faced undergraduates mill about nervously, gathering in small groups, making their hurried journeys to and fro, finding their place in this strange new world.

At a glance, their movement seems random, chaotic. Yet the decades-old paths worn into the ground under their feet suggest they are part of a bigger, older story. A story that I can see unfold by sitting here, still, for long enough to watch the patterns developing, like ants making their way to and from their nests. As random as it may all seem, these people are moving with purpose.

For almost as long as I can remember, this is how I settle into any new environment. It's a habit I developed as a child, when we used to move countries every three years or so with my father's job, often at short notice. One move might be to Botswana, the next, Nigeria. Our entire frame of reference could change overnight, from language to education to friendship groups.

But I learned to embrace the change and turn all that potential chaos into my own kind of order by watching, listening, and taking it all in. Sitting on this bench at the University of Nottingham in 2010, I'm glad of these skills, this ability to draw order out of chaos.

The years that lay ahead of me, first to my undergraduate degree, then master's and finally PhD, will be tougher and more complex than I can imagine right now. But in this quiet moment, it feels like everything is coming together. I'm Rutendo Shackleton. And I'm Sebastian Echeverri. And this is the BBC Earth Podcast. ♪

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We'll hear from the scientists trying to categorize the DNA of every plant, animal, and fungus in the entire UK. Things will get crowded in an expert's guide to murmurations, and we'll find ourselves at the center of a migrating herd of wildebeest. I think it takes a scientific mind to observe the world in the way that you described: sitting down and making sense of what you're seeing. And doing so, you unlock this whole new skill set.

You're easing your adjustment into unfamiliar worlds, which from the sounds of it is something you experience a lot. Yeah, it's always this weird sort of thing that, you know, when you move from one country to the next, especially when it's so abruptly, it's

you can feel the chaos. It's almost like you're in the rapids of a river. And it sounds like you've learned to really embrace that chaos. Yeah, I'd say more accurately find the order out of the chaos, right? So you stop swimming against the current and flailing around in the river rapids and just...

learn to go with the flow, which is what this episode is really about, you know, that tension between order and disorder and how our response to those things can actually change them. One of the things that I think is super interesting about nature is that

our perspective on something can really shift if we just change the scale of what we're looking at. So on the big surface level, a bee colony can look like a well-oiled, ordered machine. But if you follow what a bee or, say, other social insects like termites or ants do,

If you follow what they're doing on an individual level or even as a small group, they're kind of bumbling around looking for stuff. They have a general idea, but it isn't all smooth lines and perfect planning. And you can take this even further if you zoom all the way down to the size of molecules and individual atoms and even subatomic particles, the rules and the physics that describe how those objects interact with each other

have this inherent chaotic randomness to it. Of course, if you zoom all the way back out, we don't notice that every second a second, but it is there. There are scientists and researchers all over the world spending years and years of their lives trying to see how it fits together, trying to see what patterns they can notice within the chaos.

And then there's a group of researchers in Oxford, UK who have taken all of this to the next level and what has become known as the Darwin Tree of Life Project.

It's a big project. You know, they're aiming to sequence the genomes of all 70,000 species of plants and animals and fungi in the entire United Kingdom. I feel like there might be listeners out there who have heard the term gene sequencing, but are perhaps not quite sure what it means. And trust me, I've been there many, many times.

How would you explain the concept of sequencing a genome? In very general terms, a genome is the complete set of DNA for an organism. And sequencing is a process of figuring out what the order of an organism's DNA is. There are, of course, a lot of extra steps and complications along the way, but we'll leave that to the experts.

It's mid-spring, an absolutely perfect time for visiting and also sampling in the woods. We're surrounded by an absolute sea of bluebells. It's very lovely.

I'm Dr Liam Crowley and I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology and we're working on the Darwin Tree of Life project where we're trying to sequence the full genome of every species of animal, plant and fungi in the UK. And that number is more than 70,000 species. MUSIC PLAYS

Today we're just going to go after one species in particular. So it's called surface rabiesii and it's a hoverfly. They love dappled leaves of sycamore and beech, that kind of thing. And this species does a really interesting peculiar thing where the males actually sit on a leaf and hum. And no one really knows exactly why they do it. It's probably some kind of territory thing.

but it means that sometimes you walk into a woodland, especially in spring, and you just hear this background humming and for years I didn't know what it was and then I found out it was this hoverfly. Okay so I've just heard a buzzing over here to the side. There's some males just hovering above our head now and if they land on one of these leaves we might be able to hear them doing that buzzing.

So our next job is to try and catch one and I've got a fancy kite net which has got a long handle which will allow me to reach up and if I'm quick I can just reach up and yep I've got one here in the bottom of the net and I can take him out pop him in a pot and then we'll take him back to the lab and flash freeze to preserve the DNA.

We have here a bath of dry ice colder than -80 and then within that we have a cooling arena and the sample goes to that arena and it instantly flash freezes. We can then quickly photograph it and remove a leg for DNA barcoding and then the rest of the sample goes into one of these pots. Each pot has its own unique barcode and then the pots will go through into the freezer.

And in the next step, these samples will be shipped to the Sanger Institute where the sequencing happens. I'm Caroline Howard, I'm Senior Scientific Manager for the Tree of Life programme. So I lead the core laboratory team. Across the country we have hundreds of collectors who collect all manner of organisms from bees to beetles to fish in the oceans and they freeze them and send them all to us here.

Samples arrive in these beautifully bar-coded tubes. We can remove the sample from the tube and we then need to disrupt it. For smaller samples, we put the organism, something like a mosquito, into a tube with some special digestive juices and then we use our power masher to swizz the mosquito around and disrupt it. MUSIC PLAYS

So after the initial digestion or lysis of the organism, the samples go onto our apex which is an automatic DNA extraction machine.

After DNA extraction, we have a tube filled with some high quality, very pure DNA. There's very, very long fragments. The next thing we need to do is chop that DNA into smaller pieces so that we can load those smaller pieces onto the sequences. We use the Megarupter to shear the DNA into smaller sized pieces, ideal for sequencing. Welcome to the Megarupter 3, starting the shearing process.

So we have here a tube of DNA that contains the whole genome for a particular organism chopped into pieces. We then send that through to our sequencing teams and after that our bioinformatics teams build back that jigsaw and create a whole reference level genome. I'm Mark Blackster and I'm lead on the Tree of Life programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute near Cambridge.

We're sequencing from all the organisms that live in this Atlantic archipelago and also the species that live in the sea. So we're sequencing everything. So when we're up and running properly, which is probably in about three to five years' time at full speed, we hope to be doing about 5,000 genomes a year, which is 100 genomes a week, which is 20 a day, which is four before coffee in the morning.

At times it's daunting, but when you step back and look at the possibilities and the delight that will be in having the complete catalogue, it's really exciting.

Why not sequence a few genomes while you're brewing your morning coffee? You'll easily crack the 5,000 a year, right? Oh yeah, piece of cake. There's so much that we can learn from having all of those genomes. We can track the genetic diversity of the natural world, taking a microscope almost and looking at how genetically diverse all the individuals are in a certain species. Okay.

And the more we understand the genetics of the species that we're conserving, the more we can have targeted medical interventions for them if they are sick or if they need some sort of veterinary support. But it also goes the other way. We can use what we learn about these animals to find new treatments for us.

because inside of each species, there is a ton of different little biological machines that can do tasks that sometimes prove really helpful to curing our diseases as well. But there are some questions that I do have, particularly about the number of species involved, because to bring us back to the balance between order and chaos that is the heart of this episode...

Figuring out what makes one species different from another can be really tricky. How does the team know when they've hit 70,000 species when sometimes the line between one species and another can be a little chaotic? Are we dividing that based on whether the organisms can reproduce with each other or how their bodies look like or work or their role in the ecosystem or just...

how similar their DNA is on the percentage level? I'd like to think that they have a pre-existing list of 70,000 species, known species, and anything outside of that is almost like extra credit or a bonus. Will they know for sure? Because, oh, well, hold on. If someone goes back, it's like, oh, we're at, you know, 69,996, but...

Maybe if we say, well, a species is something that's 99.8% DNA similar, we'll hit 70K tomorrow, we can take the day. It's really tricky. There are some definitions that work more than others. We got to be humble and realize, yeah, we can have better definitions, we can make better labels, we can have a better system, but there's always going to be some fuzziness and no one owes us a perfect or simple answer.

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Sebastian, have you ever stood and watched birds in murmuration? Ooh, yes. There was this one time I was visiting my wife's sister in New York City, and she was in an apartment by Central Park, and it was pretty high up, and there were these huge flocks of pigeons that would gather on the roofs of other buildings. And every now and then, they'd all take off at once,

and swoop through the air, and they move as this one big mass. I mean, it almost feels like a living, giant living thing in the way that it moves so smoothly. It's just the most incredible thing, isn't it? To see all those birds, you know, flying together, moving almost as one block. It is truly impressive. ♪

Mario Pessendorfer is an animal behavior scientist, and he's been paying close attention to murmurations for several years. When animals get into large groups, funny things happen.

Many of the animals that perform murmurations make quite a tasty snack to birds of prey or other animals of prey. And when you group up into large groups, you get several benefits. One of them is the delusion effect, meaning the chance that you are the one getting picked off becomes smaller. Another effect of a large group is the confusion effect.

When humans watch murmurations, it is very hard to track one individual in the sky. And the same is true for predators. So they have a hard time picking which one they will actually try to hit. And then they miss most often. And finally, you can also hide a little bit. So the mere spatial organization of the large group can lead to the appearance of a much larger individual. You know, instead of a mouse, you are now trying to chase an elephant. And this may also deter predators.

And predation is considered one of the main drivers of murmurations, but there are also other functions. So many animals perform murmurations or these types of behaviors before they join a communal roost where they sleep overnight together. One of the fascinating aspects of

collective movement is that we have a large group of individuals moving in a coordinated manner, often without clear leadership. You know, we don't see a lead bird flying in one direction and then all other birds following.

So in the case of starlings, we don't think that there is a group of starlings that decides about what we should do or what the group should do and all the other starlings follow. Rather, it is that, you know, a certain starling is exposed to a stimulus. For example, it is approaching a food source or it perceives the dangerous peregrine falcon, a mighty aerial predator, and thus responds in a way that it would on its own.

And the birds around it do the same, and this behavior on one side of the flock then results in a wave of behavior that propagates through the whole group. And this does not just involve a single individual around you. For example, in starling memorations, we know that the birds orient themselves on the behavior of about six to seven individuals that are within their field of vision.

You know, murmurations are sort of a unique form that we perceive in starlings, but grouping behavior and moving collective movement is something that is very common in the animal kingdom. Humans actually display a behavior that is in some ways akin to murmurations, and these are mosh pits at rock concerts, where people are knocking each other around and sort of trying to run in circles.

Because mosh pits are a type of collective motion of several hundred humans that arise from very simple individual behavioral rules and lead to movement patterns that, you know, if you look at a mosh pit from above, you could almost recognize a starling murmuration. One of the coolest collective movement behaviors that I have personally observed is that of flocking in crows and jays and ravens, which are the birds in the family of Corvidae.

Crows in Vienna, Austria, the city where I live, perform these big flights that are akin to murmurations where they funnel in the sky, often up to one, two kilometer high, so that you see thousands of birds funneling, so flying in a circle above a certain area of town.

And of course, me being a student of animal behavior, I would try to find the center of this funnel and stand underneath in awe with my binoculars trying to point at individual birds, which was impossible. However, one pattern became very clear after standing there for a while.

This funnel seems to be functioning as a signal because birds join the funnel from all directions in the city. However, the leaving stream of birds all goes directly to our local cemetery. And in the cemetery is where there's a very large roost where these birds spent the night together. So to me, it looked as if this was a type of information center where the birds were signaling to all the crows that intended to sleep in this roost.

"Hey, here's our roost, here's how you're gonna get in. Just kind of check in into our funnel and then you can fly out with the group right over to the cemetery." Observing these birds was almost as if I was let in on a little bit of their secret. When you study animal behavior, you're often frustrated by the fact that you cannot simply go up to a crow and ask it, "Hey, what are you doing and why are you doing this?"

So when we're left to observe impressive behavior such as these murmurations or these bird funnels, you know, one begins to ponder and question, well, what are they doing? And maybe I have no idea. Maybe this is just an ancient ritual that they've been performing for many, many centuries and for some completely different reason than I'm hypothesizing.

While we may study and decompose many of these things into great detail and with more computer programs and simulations, sometimes we just may never get the answer. And there's something beautiful about that, that the mystery of their lives does not always need to be fully revealed to us. I wish so much that I could ask all these animals...

Hey, excuse me. Why are you doing that? Tell me right now. I know exactly what you mean. Because I used to be so jealous of Dr. Doolittle when I was a kid. Because I kid you not, I would just stare at my dogs waiting for the day that they would look at me and open their mouth and say something. Exactly. And I also have like...

I don't know if any other conservationists or behaviorists feel this way, but I had fears during my PhD research that one day the elephants I was studying would start talking and tell me that all the behavior I'd interpreted them doing was wrong. Yeah.

They were just messing with you. They just thought it was fun. Okay, well, we'll keep an eye on that or an ear out for any elephant revelations. It's so cool when someone like Mario can get at least a little bit of the mystery resolved.

I'm fascinated by how such a complicated, coordinated behavior can happen without each bird talking directly to each other. They're just paying attention to their immediate neighbors and just one movement on one side of the huge flock can sweep across the whole group. Birds are not the only animals that move in these huge formations.

The first were insects, mayflies and locusts have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years gathering in huge numbers and traveling in swarms for a variety of reasons. One of those is migration, looking for new places to live. And a really interesting example that we can see today is in wildebeest which move in these huge herds across hundreds of miles.

and it seems like they do this in response to the weather. It looks very chaotic up close, these enormous herds sweeping across the landscape. But if you observe the patterns, it appears that they know where to find the luscious grass, which grows shortly after storms and heavy rains. Chris Watson is a wildlife sound recordist who has worked on many of the BBC's blue-chip natural history series, alongside presenters such as Sir David Attenborough.

Over the years I've had many trips to the short grass plains of the Maasai Mara in East Africa, in Kenya.

And one of the greatest pieces of behaviour that I've ever witnessed is the annual wildebeest migration. This great circle of life as the wildebeest follow the new grass and follow the food supply as the rains carry them round across from Kenya into Tanzania and then returning backwards and forwards across the River Mara.

If you look closely at a wildebeest herd, it fills your field of view. You can't hear much else because of this constant rumble of the animals communicating and the sound of the hooves. The River Mara presents a significant obstacle to wildebeest and it's a place where they gather in their tens and hundreds of thousands because crossing the River Mara is probably the most dangerous activity in their lives because they are

preyed upon by Nile crocodiles which inhabit the river and wait. The only way to get close-up sound is to get the microphones in close.

So I've spent lots of time over the years sort of perfecting various techniques, some more successful than others, by fixing microphones in places by the water's edge on the River Mara or in some of the croton thickets, the short vegetation, the very stout, sturdy vegetation. It's a place where wildebeest live.

wouldn't normally charge through because the vegetation is very tough, like very sharp thorns. I might have to do this in several places and then run very long cables, 100, 200 meters back to our vehicle. But then of course I'd have to bury the cables because the wildebeest with their hooves or other animals, ground squirrels, can often dig them up. It can be really satisfying listening back to a recording because the power of sound just takes me straight back to that place.

But the most important thing, the most powerful thing, I think, is how it stimulates our memory and imagination.

The BBC Earth podcast was hosted by me, Rutendo Shackleton. And me, Sebastian Echeverry. Many thanks to all our interviewees, Liam Crowley, Caroline Howard, and Mark Blackster from the Darwin Tree of Life Project, Mario Pessendorfer for his interview about murmurations, and Chris Watson for his interview and the recordings of Migrating Wildebeest.

The producers are Jeff Marsh and Rachel Byrne. The researcher is Seb Masters. The podcast theme music was composed by Axel Kukutie and mixing and additional sound design were done by Peregrine Andrews. The production manager is Catherine Stringer and the production coordinator is Gemma Wooten. The associate producer is Kristen Kane and the executive producer is Deborah Dudgeon. The BBC Earth podcast was a BBC Studios production for BBC Earth.

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.