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Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
These Beautiful Birds Form Bonds That Resemble Human Friendship, New Study Finds
One quality often found in lasting friendships is the willingness to help one another. While this behavior is innate when it comes to human friendships, new research from Columbia University reveals that superb starlings—songbirds native to eastern Africa—also have reciprocal helping relationships. Up until now, researchers thought family ties were the reason animals were cooperative with each other. However, the study led by Alexis Earl, a former PhD student at Columbia University, reveals that superb starlings form lasting friendships built on reciprocity, helping each other with the belief that the favor will be returned. "Starling societies are not just simple families," Columbia professor Dustin Rubenstein told Columbia News. "They're much more complex, containing a mixture of related and unrelated individuals that live together, much in the way that humans do." Related: The 8 Best Apps and Tools for Identifying Birds, According to Experts The research team observed the birds for 20 years at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. During 40 breeding seasons, they documented thousands of interactions among hundreds of birds. Using DNA, they traced genetic ties to help map out the social networks within each group. For example, a bird that helped another during one breeding season might later become a breeder and receive help from that same feathered friend. According to the study, which was published in Nature, the birds helped non-relatives to build a network of allies. Because the harsh conditions in the African savannah are unpredictable, forming bonds with non-relatives might serve as insurance. It's a way to maximize survival, not just for one bird but for the entire group. This type of mutual support is a strategy that mirrors human friendships. The researchers also discovered that these reciprocal bonds sometimes lasted years. And in some cases, the birds chose to help specific non-relatives even when their kin were available to assist. "Many of these birds are essentially forming friendships over time," Rubenstein said. "Our next step is to explore how these relationships form, how long they last, why some relationships stay robust, while others fall apart." According to Columbia News, this data builds on decades of research collected by Rubenstein and his colleagues and students on animal relationships. They have examined animal communities in various species around the world, including snapping shrimp in the Caribbean, wasps in Africa, beetles in Asia, and mice and lizards in Australia. "I think this kind of reciprocal helping behavior is likely going on in a lot of animal societies, and people just haven't studied them long enough to be able to detect it," Rubenstein said. Read the original article on Martha Stewart
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Science
- New York Times
These Beautiful Birds Form Something Like Lasting Friendships
True friends, most people would agree, are there for each other. Sometimes that means offering emotional support. Sometimes it means helping each other move. And if you're a superb starling — a flamboyant, chattering songbird native to the African savanna — it means stuffing bugs down the throats of your friends' offspring, secure in the expectation that they'll eventually do the same for yours. Scientists have long known that social animals usually put blood relatives first. But for a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers crunched two decades of field data to show that unrelated members of a superb starling flock often help each other raise chicks, trading assistance to one another over years in a behavior that was not previously known. 'We think that these reciprocal helping relationships are a way to build ties,' said Dustin Rubenstein, a professor of ecology at Columbia University and an author of the paper. Superb starlings are distinctive among animals that breed cooperatively, said Alexis Earl, a biologist at Cornell University and an author of the paper. Their flocks mix family groups with immigrants from other groups. New parents rely on up to 16 helpers, which bring chicks extra food and help run off predators.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Discover Wild Birds Behaving Suspiciously Like Friends
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways The ability to cooperate and work together is not unique to humans; indeed, it's one of the most successful strategies for collective survival in the whole tree of life, from the give-and-take between symbionts, to the kindness of strangers in the street. Friendship – strong and lasting social bonds between unrelated members of the same species – can be a part of that cooperative behavior. It can be pretty hard to confidently identify in non-humans animals, but scientists have just discovered something that looks a heck of a lot like it in birds. More than 20 years of data on superb starlings (Lamprotornis superbus), analyzed by a team led by biologist Alexis Earl of Cornell University, reveals clear examples of reciprocal helping: offering assistance to unrelated members of the flock, with the expectation that the favor will be returned. "This is the first real evidence of reciprocity in a cooperatively breeding bird," ornithologist Dustin Rubenstein of Cornell University told ScienceAlert, "and one of the strongest pieces of evidence for reciprocity occurring outside of humans." Superb starlings live in flocks of up to around 60 individuals. ( Harvey Barrison/Flickr , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) For social animals that live their lives in large communities, cooperative behavior is necessary. It's common to see animals with familial ties giving each other assistance, but some animals take it a step further. Cows, for instance, have unrelated companions whose company they seem to favor. Male dolphins may form social bonds based on shared skills. Vampire bats demonstrate reciprocal food-sharing. And, of course, non-human primates forge social bonds. Non-familial social behavior has even been observed in rooks. "What we really have here are reciprocal social relationships," Rubenstein explained. "In other words, I might help you today and you might then help me at some point in the future. Both individuals benefit from these long-term reciprocal helping relationships. Because they often occur among unrelated individuals, you might think of them as you do a friendship." Identifying these relationships in wild animals, however, is not very easy to do. The team's work was based on observations collected on wild starlings of eastern Africa, a bird whose flocks consist of between seven and 60 members. These birds are known as cooperative breeders, where non-parents help to raise the youngsters. The data, collected between 2002 and 2021, cover nine flocks and 40 breeding seasons. To contextualize the observational data, the researchers also collected DNA from some of the birds to determine the genetic relationships between them. From the observational data, the researchers cataloged instances of assistance, when the birds were seen either bringing food to a nest, or helping to defend a nest. They then identified the individuals involved in the assistance. Unsurprisingly, most of the reciprocal helping occurred between related individuals. But reciprocal helping was by no means limited to family groups within the flock. Animals that live together in groups need to be able to cooperate. ( Никонова Вероника/iNaturalist , CC BY-NC 4.0) "Other starlings, typically immigrants who come into the group, form these strong social relationships with unrelated individuals and reciprocate helping over time," Rubenstein said. "These immigrants don't have relatives with whom they could help breed, so they have to form new social relationships upon joining the group." This finding challenges the assumption that birds help each other with their parental responsibilities purely out of altruism due to kin selection, the researchers say. Even when relatives are available to help out, some non-related birds help each other, swapping the parent and helper roles from breeding season to breeding season. In fact, Rubenstein noted, the birds even seem to form close bonds with just a few other specific individuals, suggesting that the relationships are not random, but chosen deliberately. We probably can't go so far as to call them besties – as doing so might be anthropomorphizing – but it's not entirely dissimilar, either. "I think this study tells us that birds cooperate for many different reasons. Starlings need to have helpers to raise offspring. They can recruit relatives, who both benefit from the genes they share with the offspring, or they can recruit unrelated individuals by forming long-term social bonds," Rubenstein says. "These might be considered analogous to forming a friendship." The research has been published in Nature. Related News
