Group mobbing behavior gives male
birds the chance to impress potential mating partners
Date: February 22, 2017
Source: Springer
Dive bombing a much larger bird
isn't just a courageous act by often smaller bird species to keep predators at
bay. It also gives male birds the chance to show off their physical qualities
in order to impress females. This is according to a study in Springer's journal
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology on predator mobbing behavior of birds where
potential prey approach and harass would-be predators such as owls. The study
was led by Filipe Cunha of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the
Federal University of Ouro Preto in Brazil.
In birds, mobbing behavior
includes calls, aerial swoops and even physical attacks. For a long time,
researchers believed that this behavior mainly served as protection against
predators, since most predators move away in response to mobbing.
As an added bonus, mobbing might
give males the chance to advertise who has the best physical qualities, in an
effort to impress potential mating partners. To investigate this further, Cunha
and his fellow researchers studied what happened when replicas of two types of
owls of similar size were presented to a bird community in south-eastern
Brazil. The models were of a pygmy owl that regularly eats birds, and of a less
threatening burrowing owl. The researchers measured the size of the mob that
then assembled, the intensity by which individual members participated in the
mock attacks, and whether things changed if females from the same species were
present.
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