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Plants and Animals

Grey Parrots Prove Sharing Is Caring By Going Out Of Their Way To Help Needy Neighbors

The selfishness of the fauna is doing something great for someone else at your own expense. You may not consider vampire bats to be the most charitable animals in the world, but the wild reorganization of the members of the group who failed to eat them has seen in the blood. Something like this as a behavior to be surprised, evolutionarily speaking, does not directly encourage the continuity of your genetic material as an incentive for the survival of strangers, but helps your relatives.

Somewhere between selfishness and selflessness is behavior like procedural helping and reciprocal behavior, which is inspired by a common goal or as a way to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship in terms of speaking, respectively. Both of these behaviors have observed in mammals but have never seen experimentally in birds. New research published in the journal Current Biology has shown that blue-headed macaws is not as keen on helping their neighbors as it is on African gray parrots.

Grey Parrots Prove Sharing Is Caring By Going Out Of Their Way To Help Needy Neighbors

To come to this conclusion, the researchers in the study conducted an experiment where birds given tokens that could be traded for food. They were able to establish if the birds understood the token trade by changing the presence of neighboring birds and the ease of doing business (a.k.a., the researcher with the product).

Their observations show that African gray parrots (those who like to swear) voluntarily and spontaneously give tokens to transfer to other African grays. This charitable behavior grew among birds that were familiar and an event where researchers were adamant for their attention. Sharing and caring did not stop there, because once the tokenless and helper birds of their neighbors returned the favor after turning the tables, the charity repaid the law for passing tokens. Bella and Kimmi, you can see the two participants that share bellowed. On the other hand, there is no such generosity among the blue-headed macaws, who rarely notice the tokens in order to keep the valuable coin to themselves.

This kind of material support, driven by social attitudes and interactions, although not seen in both species, it is interesting to note that it exists absolutely in birds. The authors of the study concluded that the existence of such benevolent behavior in African gray parrots might indicate the possibility of continuous evolution in birds and mammals.

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