Gulls decide their food choices by imitating humans: Study

Urban gulls, often found dwelling in parkside ponds, mimic what humans eat and would prefer to eat the same food 95 per cent of the time if given the choice, a new study has said.

The peer-reviewed study was published in Biology Letters on May 24.

Which gulls were studied?

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The researchers studied the behaviour of herring gulls (Larus argentatus) which are one of few species whose habitat include the spots close to human urban settlements.

The researchers studied inter-species social cognition through them.

Gulls-humans food connection: What was found?

It was found that Gulls living in an urban environment pay close attention to human behaviour surrounding food and have been termed as kleptoparasites, to use the scientific term used to loosely define the species that steal other species' food.

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"Many people still think that gulls are not very smart, even though kleptoparasitism to us suggested a higher level of cognition, so we wanted to explore this further," Franziska Feist from the University of Sussex, UK, was quoted as saying by Newscientist.

How researchers found Gulls-humans food connection?

The research team attempted to manipulate the gulls' attention through cues and then analysed their reaction for a few months on the Brighton beachfront in 2021 and 2022.

They gave the herring gulls the choice between two differently coloured food items.

For example packs of potato chips, in the presence of a human who either did nothing or ate food that matched one of the two food items in front of the gulls.

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Of the observed gulls, 48 per cent approached the food when the experimenter was eating against 19 per cent when they weren't eating.

Researchers found that when they did approach the food, they chose the same colour that the experimenter was eating 95 per cent of the time.

What does it mean?

According to the researchers, it means that gulls can use human cues to influence their decision on what to forage. In terms of evolution, since their urban foraging is rather recent, these abilities could be a by-product of the cognitive flexibility inherent in kleptoparasitic species.

"The evolutionary history of herring gulls wouldn’t have involved humans, since their urbanization is rather recent," says Feist. "So the skills we identified, those that allow them to learn from another species through observations, must come from more general purpose intelligence, rather than an innate ability. This is a very exciting notion to me."

"I think it shows very clearly that gulls are highly adaptable birds when it comes to foraging," Damien Farine from the University of Zurich in Switzerland was quoted as saying by The Jerusalem Post.

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