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You’ve probably heard of trash pandas: raccoons looting trash. How about litter parrots?
What might seem exotic to Americans and Europeans, sulfur-crested cockatoos are ubiquitous in Sydney’s suburban areas. They’ve adapted to the human environment and are known to be smart at manipulating objects, so it’s not entirely surprising that they go after a rich food source. But you could say that the spread of their latest trick to open trash cans has lifted the lid on social learning and cultural evolution in animals.
Birds do not acquire skills by imitating others, which is social learning. But the details of the technique evolve to differ in different groups as the innovation, a hallmark of animal culture, spreads.
Barbara C. Klump, behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany and first author of a book. Report on cockatoo research in the journal Science“It’s actually quite a complex behavior because it has multiple steps,” he said.
Dr. Klump and colleagues divided the behavior into five moves. First, a bird uses its beak to lift the lid from the container. Then, “they open and then they hold and then they walk along one edge and then they flip it over. And there is variation in each of these stages.”
Some birds walk to the left, some to the right, take different steps or hold their heads differently. The process is analogous to the spread and evolution of human cultural innovations such as language, or bird song, a classic example of animal culture in the same species that can vary from region to region.
Dr. Klump and his colleagues in Germany and Australia spent two years planning the spread of the behavior in Sydney. The behavior became more common, but different birds did not spawn in random places, as if they were figuring out the litter box technique on their own. It spread outward from its origin, showing that the cockatoo had learned from each other how to do it.
The new skill of cockatoos opens the door to a whole new resource for birds. This is adaptive cultural evolution propagating at the speed of light compared to biological evolution. Dr. Klump noted that culture has been called a second inheritance system, which applies to both humans and animals, enabling us and them to adapt and change our behavior quickly.
It’s impossible to know which bird or birds first developed the litter box technique, but apparently there isn’t a single cockatoo genius. Dr. Klump said that during the course of the study, the behavior appeared a second time in a suburb far from the first. The technique has been reinvented.
Scientists have observed social learning and what they call culture in primates, songbirds, and other animals. Different chimpanzee groups, such as cockatoos, show slightly different tool use patterns.
Researchers not only observed different techniques in different fields. They also marked and observed nearly 100 cockatoos to better understand individual behaviors.
They found that about 30 percent of the birds tried to open the boxes, and 10 percent were successful. Most of the successful birds were males. Dr. Klump said they are successful because men tend to be larger and perhaps better able to cope with physical demands. Or it could be that they rank higher and normally have first access to food.
What about the birds that don’t try to open the boxes? Were they just not smart or not big enough? Dr. This isn’t necessary, Klump said, because once the bins are open, any cockatoo can come in and eat the bait without doing any work. Maybe he said they had a strategy: “This bird can do it – I’ll wait until they open it.” Whether this is true is the subject of future research.
Mark O’Hara of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, who studies wildlife Goffin’s cockatoos in Indonesiasaid the study “nicely combines citizen science with rigorous direct observation.”
He said he’s particularly interested in larger, higher-ranking parrots doing the job of exploiting the new resource. “In primates,” he said, “lower-ranking individuals must find new ways to access food, while stronger dominant individuals can displace and exploit these ‘discoveries’.”
The first parrot species known to open litter boxes was the kea, found in a park setting in New Zealand. But in this case, Dr. O’Hara said humans cut cultural evolution in the bud.
“It would be interesting to see how Kea will evolve over time, but unfortunately, the park was not very happy with the garbage raids and changed the lids of the trash cans.”
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