Racing Turtles

GULLS WILL DECIDE WHAT TO EAT BY WATCHING PEOPLE 

Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) can perfectly thrive in coastal  and urban landscapes, however, these birds will steal your food as soon as you are distracted. Urban gulls pay attention to human behaviour in food-related contexts, and will mimic what humans almost all the time, a new study shown.

In a simple test, researchers studied how herring gulls behave in front person eating snacks on Brighton beachfront, UK. They gave the gulls the choice between two differently coloured potato chips,  and when the human were eating potatos chips from one color, seagulls approached the food, and chose the same colour that the experimenter was eating, the 95 per cent of the time.

Seagulls were able to use human cues for stimulus enhancement and foraging decisions. Given the relatively recent history of urbanization in herring gulls, this cross-species social information transfer could be a by-product of the cognitive flexibility inherent in species who steal food, called kleptoparasitic species. This success in urban environments is suggested to result from behavioural flexibility, which is likely to require specific cognitive adaptations. In food-stealing birds, success is said to reflect an ability to integrate and use information about both the environment and other individuals, and kleptoparasites generally have usually larger relative brain sizes than their hosts.  

#me when I see my coworker eating potato chips

Despite being the world’s largest fish, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are still poorly understood, and in spite of researchers though these big fishes were pasive feeders, filtering they food from the water, now researchers have found evidence of whale sharks engaging in bottom-feeding behaviours.

This event took place near La Paz, in southern Baja California, Mexico, a well know place as a whale shark hotspot, and was recorder by local guides, providing crusial information on this unknown behaviour never seen in whale sharks. Despite is still unknown what whale sharks might eat in this seafloor foraging, it is likely they feed on small benthic crustaceans.

You can take the carpet shark off the seafloor, but you can’t take the seafloor out of the carpet shark.

In 2004, this giant Aldabra tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) seems to have survived an ocean voyage from Atoll island of Aldabra to the east coast of Africa. That’s more than 740 km! The barnacles size suggests its trip took 6-7 weeks!

Despite the tortoise size, the trans-oceanic dispersal is supposed to be the mechanism where tortoises, and many other animals settle on islands around the world. This is the first direct evidence of a tortoise surviving a oceanic trip. 

- Another record of a giant Aldabra tortoise off Alphonse Island, The Seychelles, December 2005. Photograph by J. Gerlach

Researchers believe that after torrential winds and hurricanes, tortoises are transported to the sea, left to its lucky. This is the classic model of oceanic island colonization. It is ironic that the first documented trans-oceanic movement of a tortoise occurred from an island to a continent, rather than the reverse direction that is so importantto island biogeography