Food In Exchange For Grooming

The parent barn owl has come back to its nest and to its young after a hunt, bringing with it a vole as food for the young. Unfortunately, the food cannot be easily split, and so only one chick can be fed at a time, while the other five chicks wait (barn owls raise six chicks at once on average, but not all of them hatch at the same time). It wouldn’t be surprising if the chicks competed for the food, and then the eldest chick won because it’s larger and healthier, taking the food as their price. But we’re talking about barn owls here, and they might just be one of the most generous birds on the planet, as the elder owlets sometimes share their meal with their younger siblings.

Such cooperative behavior has been reported in adult nonhuman primates and birds, but rarely among young.

A young owlet, however, has to be a good younger sibling to its elder sibling if it wants to share food, and so the young owlet decides to groom the elder sibling to “maximize the probability of being fed in return.”

“I don’t know any other species where you can find it,” says Pauline Ducouret, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. But scientists weren’t sure what prompted the food sharing. Now, observations of nests show that elder barn owlets offer their food to their younger siblings in exchange for grooming, Ducouret and her colleagues report in the July issue of the American Naturalist.

More details about this study over at ScienceNews.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: chdwckvnstrsslhm/ Wikimedia Commons)


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