Nazca BoobyWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, BENJAMINT444
Abused become abusers
A common explanation for human child abuse—that the abuser was mistreated as a child him—also applies to Nazca boobies nesting on Española Island in the Galápagos, according to new research published in the October issue of The Auk. Chicks that are bitten and pecked by neighboring birds grow up to be abusers themselves. The study provides some of the first evidence that this "cycle of violence" exists in wild animals.
The sea birds' chick abuse is "one of the first things you notice; it's that obvious and disturbing," David Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told ScienceNOW. To understand the consequences of this behavior, Anderson, who has been observing the boobies since the mid-1980s, and his ...
