Polly wants a cracker. Polly gets chopped vegetables because parrots need a diverse array of nutrients. Polly eats one bite and flings the rest onto the floor.
This is a common occurrence in the homes of parrot-lovers across the world. No matter what sort of delicious, nutritious meal is prepared, "half of it lands on the floor and stuck to the walls," said Kat Gupta, the caretaker of a bronze-winged Pionus named Leia and a frequenter of online parrot message boards.
Polly, Leia and their peers aren't necessarily being picky. They're just being parrots. According to a study published Oct. 24 in Scientific Reports, wild parrots across the world also waste food — an unusual and confusing habit in the animal kingdom, where making the most of a meal is generally an important part of survival.
The new study provides "a comprehensive picture of parrots' food-wasting behavior in their natural environment," said Anastasia Krasheninnikova, a biologist at the Max Planck Comparative Cognition Research Group in Spain, an independent commenter.
Researchers have long noticed their wild study subjects flinging around fruits, flowers and seeds that might have made perfectly good eating. A group of ornithologists tracked this behavior in the wild over several years. They also watched for it in more controlled settings. The result was data covering 103 species in 17 countries, encompassing 30% of known parrot types.
In some cases, "it looked like they were playing with the food instead of eating it," said Esther Sebastian-Gonzalez, a postdoctoral biology researcher at Universidad Miguel Hernández in Spain, and the lead author of the paper.
The data yielded patterns. Parrots are more likely to drop unripe fruits than ripe ones, and they're more careful with food during breeding season, when they are raising chicks.
Sebastian-Gonzalez's best guess is that the parrots are pruning the trees to get sweeter fruits and bigger fruits later.
Style on 11/11/2019