ABOVE: A parrot gives an experimenter a token to get food.
ANASTASIA KRASHENINNIKOVA
For the first time, altruistic behaviors have been seen in birds in a lab setting. African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) will spontaneously help each other obtain food even when there is no obvious benefit to the helper, according to a new study published in Current Biology yesterday (January 9).
Désirée Brucks of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Auguste von Bayern of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany studied helping behavior in eight African grey parrots. They placed two parrots at a time into an enclosure separated by a wall with a small hole. One parrot was given small metal tokens to pass to the other parrot, which could then exchange them for nuts from a researcher. But the parrot originally given the tokens did not have any access to food. Transferring the ...
