A Sulphur-crested cockatoo in a sleepy suburb of Australia had a breakthrough sometime in the 2010s. This bird, likely a large, dominant male, figured out how to use its powerful beak to open garbage bins and find food inside. A trend that spread throughout the population of cockatoos was caused by the innovation. Birds from different suburbs came up with their own ways of opening the bin. One bird in a neighborhood might use their beak to grasp a bin's handle, while another might use their feet to grasp the lid. The cockatoos may have started an arms race with humans desperate to keep their neighborhoods clean by raiding garbage bins and trashing streets in the process.
Like crows, cockatoos have a formidable bird brain. According to Elizabeth Hobson, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the new study, parrots are very flexible in their problem-solving abilities. They are able to learn from other people.
The ability to learn was highlighted in a paper that first documented the opening of bins by the birds. Barbara Klump is the lead author of both studies and she describes the behavior in detail. Klump and her colleagues decided to focus on the human side of the story after seeing residents try to protect their bins. She says she was amazed by how many different ways of protection there were.
A rubber snake on top was given a rank of 2 by the researchers, while a heavy rock was given a rank of 3. The attached weight method got a rank of 5. Klump and her team analyzed their spatial network and found that humans living close together tend to share the same strategies. The majority of people who picked up their method socially did so from their neighbors. The researchers are seeing that. She says the residents may be picking up defensive strategies passively.
There is evidence of a potential innovation arms race between humans and the cockatoos, in which a behavioral change in one of the species leads to a new, socially learned response by the other, which itself Prompts a response. One of the most common reasons for changing a protection method was that the cockatoos were able to defeat their original strategy by nudging a brick off the top of a bin. Scientists have suspected for a while that there was an innovation arms race, but no one had actually looked for it. Lucy Aplin is a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior and the senior author of both studies. There's evidence that there's an innovation arms race.
The researchers will need to return to the birds to confirm the arms race. They need a bird's-eye view of an escalating back and forth now that they know that cockatoos can defeat a human defense. As humans increase the effectiveness of their own strategies, more work needs to be done to show how the birds are learning to defeat those measures. This face-off will likely be welcomed by the community in the area. Everyone has an opinion on the birds. I'm amazed how willing people are to fill out the survey, it's been going on for four years. I'm very thankful.
It costs time and money to clean trash from the streets, and it's annoying to have personal waste scattered around for all to see. In addition to demonstrating how dynamic animal cultures can be, the research also has implications for how humans coexist with their animal neighbors. The study shows how we need to consider animal behavior. We need to think about how we respond if we respond to nuisance behaviors.
The human-cockatoo conflict has one clear winner, and that is science.
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