Swarming behavior has always fascinated physicists, biologists, and behavioral scientists alike—as well as anyone who’s seen a sky-darkening flock of starlings twist into its mesmerizing shapes . It’s hard not to wonder how such elegantly concerted behavior arises on the fly, or how on earth the birds keep from running into one another. But birds aren’t the only things that swarm like this, and while the idea of The Birds acting as a collective is scary enough to merit a Hitchcock film, this might just be a psychological sublimation of the instinctive fear of a very real and far-more-threatening swarm: Locusts. Now, research from the University of Bath gives us some understanding of how this swarming behavior happens in insects, and how we might disrupt it.