Seagulls choose their meals based on what people nearby are eating

Seagulls are meticulous about our food choices and show a strong preference for what people seem to be eating nearby.

Herring Gull (silver plating) are notorious food-snatchers, or, in scientific terms, theft parasites, ubiquitous in Britain’s coastal towns and cities. Franziska Feist, from the University of Sussex, UK, said: “Many people still think that gulls aren’t very smart, even though thieves suggest higher levels of cognitive ability for us. We wanted to investigate this further.”

For several months in 2021 and 2022, Feist and his colleagues surveyed seagulls along Brighton’s coast. They presented a flock of seagulls with bags of blue and green potato chips. The experimenter sat on the ground about 5 meters away and either stared at the seagulls or took out a green or blue packet from a bag and ate it.

The researchers found that 48 percent of the birds approached the packet when the experimenter was eating, and 19 percent approached it when they were not. When a seagull approached and pecked at the packet, it chose the same color as the experimenter’s packet 95 percent of the time.

The fact that gulls’ foraging choices were influenced by human behavior indicates that gulls are excellent social learners with high levels of cognitive ability, the researchers say.

“Humans would not have been involved in the evolutionary history of herring gulls, because their urbanization is relatively recent,” says Feist. “Thus, the skills we have identified, the skills that allow us to learn from other species through observation, must come from more general intelligence rather than innate ability. This to me is very It’s an exciting concept.”

“I think it underscores that seagulls are very adaptable birds when it comes to foraging,” says Damien Fallin of the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Madeleine Gormas, from the University of Exeter, UK, said such studies could play a role in minimizing conflicts between humans and seagulls, but the use of human food cues by birds is problematic. says that there may be “Seagulls seem to have found us to be an excellent source of information for finding food,” she says. “However, processed foods such as those eaten by humans are a relatively new addition to the diet of wildlife, and it is unclear if they are actually beneficial to them, and if species are declining, it is likely that they will not. are concerned.”