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WHO CARES ABOUT FIREFLIES?: A TALK WITH STEVEN STROGATZ - Introduction by Alan Alda

We see fantastic examples of synchrony in the natural world all around us. To give a few examples, there were persistent reports when the first Western travelers went to southeast Asia, back to the time of Sir Francis Drake in the 1500s, of spectacular scenes along riverbanks, where thousands upon thousands of fireflies in the trees would all light up and go off simultaneously. These kinds of reports kept coming back to the West, and were published in scientific journals, and people who hadn’t seen it couldn’t believe it. Scientists said that this is a case of human misperception, that we’re seeing patterns that don’t exist, or that it’s an optical illusion. How could the fireflies, which are not very intelligent creatures, manage to coordinate their flashings in such a spectacular and vast way?