Flamingos Can Be Picky about Company
By Jason G. Goldman on May 7, 2020
Chilean flamingos. Credit: Getty Images
They don’t stand on one leg around just anybody but often prefer certain members of the flock.
Spend some time watching flamingos, and you might think that not much goes on in their tiny heads. But these elegant avians actually lead complex social lives. Each bird has certain other individuals it prefers to spend time with and others it avoids. In other words, flamingos have friends.
The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the WWT, manages a number of wetlands in the U.K., some of which have communities of captive aquatic birds, including flamingos.
“They didn’t quite know whether they could just take a flamingo out of the environment and stick it in a new flock, and it would be fine. Or should they care a bit more about the social choices that the birds were making?”
Paul Rose, a psychologist at the University of Exeter’s Center for Research in Animal Behavior.
More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/flamingos-can-be-picky-about-company/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciam%2Fevolution+%28Topic%3A+Evolution%29
