By Anupum Pant
The miscellanies of the world are amusing. Phil Torres, an etymologist who loves spending most of his time in the Amazon rain forest, recently came across a weird insect, or more specifically a group of insects, which move and stop together. Why they do it and how they do it is still unknown. But people do have some plausible theories to explain the whys.
The group of insects called barklice have been seen to do this. First Phill saw them moving in haphazard directions, and then they stopped, and started moving again. Each one of these seemed to be moving in a random direction a couple of inches from each other. How this coordination was taking place, he had no idea. It was probably due to the silky web they were moving on, which was able to carry the information. But then, later he came across a video where they weren’t moving on a web.
Some say that they do this to look like a single big organism to the predator. While others say that they do this to stop and listen for a while and detect predators, because moving makes a lot of excess undesirable noise.
This is what they do the almost-perfect coordinated movement…