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When yellow-legged gulls call out in alarm, their offspring heed their warnings—even if they haven’t hatched yet. A new study suggests that unhatched gulls vibrate their eggshells to warn nestmates of the danger, too, researchers reported yesterday (July 22) in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The developing gulls may be able to alert nestmates to danger regardless of whether their siblings have yet developed a sense of hearing.
“It is already well known that embryos are able to perceive certain cues from outside the egg, but it has not been known until now that they can capture this information from outside and transfer it from one embryo to another,” says coauthor Jose Noguera, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Vigo in Spain, in an interview with The Guardian.
Noguera and his colleagues collected 90 gull eggs on Sálvora Island, a small land mass off the Spainish ...
