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ABC News
2 days ago
- Science
- ABC News
Lab Notes: What makes Sydney's cockies so clever?
Belinda Smith: First, they came for our rubbish. News grab: Move over Ibis, there's a new bin chicken in town. The iconic Aussie bird's mostly been prying open bin lids. Belinda Smith: And now, they're taking our water. News grab: Sulphur crested cockatoos in Western Sydney have been observed using public drinking fountains, learning to twist the handles and drinking from the bubblers. Belinda Smith: And it's not just one or two cockies doing this. More than 100 have been spotted drinking from bubblers. So, what do these entertaining exploits tell us about cocky innovation? And even about cocky culture? Hi, I'm Belinda Smith and you're listening to Lab Notes, the show that dissects the science behind new discoveries and current events. To explain why these birds are so bloody brainy is Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at the Australian National University. Now, I've seen children struggle to turn a water fountain tap and they have hands. Cockies have claws. So, how do they manage? Lucy Aplin: What they have to do is they have to hold on to the stem of the fountain. So, imagine a fountain you might get in your local sports fields, very classic upright model. So, they're gripping onto the stem of the upright part with one foot and then they're turning the twist handle with their other foot. Now, the twist handle has a spring in it. So, it'll come back so that the water doesn't run forever. So, the birds actually have to put their weight down to hold that spring. And then they have to twist their head back to drink the water while keeping the weight over the handle. So, it's quite a complex action that actually involves every body part. Belinda Smith: It's not just the strength to turn the tap but also the flexibility to kind of manoeuvre their body so that they can then enjoy the water that's coming out of the tap. Exactly, and Lucy Aplin: the foot-mouth coordination. I always say eye-hand-eye coordination, but foot-eye coordination, foot-eye-mouth coordination in this case. So, where do these particular cockies live? So, we observed this behaviour in the Western Sydney Parklands area just near Nurragingy Reserve, which is around sort of near Doonside train station, if anyone knows Western Sydney. Belinda Smith: In 2019, purely by chance, one of Lucy's colleagues, Barbara Klump, first spotted a thirsty cocky. Lucy Aplin: She was walking across the sports field and she saw them doing this. And she then walked into the Nurragingy Reserve, which is next door, and asked the rangers about it. And they said, oh yeah, they do it around here all the time. They've been doing it for ages. So, I think they thought it was a, you know, this is just what the local cockies do. As many Australians will attest, they do lots of weird and wonderful things. But we were pretty excited, so we thought, right, we have to study this. Belinda Smith: Then, not long after that initial sighting, Lucy and her team started keeping tabs on one particularly popular drinking fountain. The Lucy Aplin: drinking fountain that was most used was the one in the sports field right next to where the sleeping trees were. So, they were using it first thing in the morning and in the afternoon. How successful are they at getting water? So, we found when we did these intensive observations at one drinking fountain, that actually only about just under 50 per cent of the attempts were successful. So, individuals could try multiple times. And sometimes the attempts were unsuccessful because they were obviously distracted by the other birds that were queuing. Maybe a more dominant bird was queuing and they were trying to keep an eye on that bird at the same time and that was influencing their success. So, they were aware that this thing could produce water and were trying and were either in the process of learning or were very successful at it already. Belinda Smith: Ah, right. And so, did they learn from watching other cockies do it? Lucy Aplin: That's what we assume. So, we don't think that every individual cocky innovated this behaviour or we would be equally likely to see cockatoos drinking from drinking fountains all over Australia. Everywhere there are cockatoos and drinking fountains of which there are many places with both. So, we think that the evidence we have is highly suggestive that actually it's spreading through social learning. So, one bird or maybe a couple of birds initially invented this behaviour, worked it out and then other birds observed them and adopted the behaviour and it spread through the local group to form a local tradition in this area. So, Belinda Smith: when this behaviour was sort of first observed by your postdoc, Barbara, was this during a particularly dry Lucy Aplin: period? No, it was actually towards the end of winter. So, it would have been in August, September because that's when we're usually doing our fieldwork. So, it wasn't particularly dry. It was something that we were a little bit surprised by for that exact reason. We thought this is a really interesting behaviour for the technical innovation part of it. It seems quite complex and it's interesting to understand how it spreads and whether it's continuing to spread. But alongside that, there's this really interesting question which is what is the adaptive benefit of it? Because we'd just come off studying another innovation which was the bin opening behaviour which we're still studying in the south of Sydney. And there, it's really obvious what the cockatoos are getting out of it. They're getting bread or pasta or pizza or all high calorie items. Delicious things. Exactly. But here, there's an artificial lake that they've made in the lovely Chinese gardens in the Nurragingy Parklands. There's a local river they could be using. There's lots of local water sources and yet they seem to be preferring to do this highly complicated behaviour where often they also have to queue for it. So, it was a bit of a mystery we also wanted to solve as to why. So, did you find out? Well, we have three working hypotheses. Unfortunately, we couldn't answer them in this study but we're hoping to get to them. So, in this study, we wanted to ask just straightforward, are they using this as a supplement to other water sources? For example, when it's really hot and dry. And we saw no evidence for that. It seemed more like they were actually preferring to use drinking fountains over those other alternative water sources. So, then we had three follow on hypotheses. Maybe the water just tastes better. And that's not, I think, out of this world because if you think about whether you would rather go down to the creek, drink slimy, silty, muddy creek water. Or whether you might prefer a nice Sydney tap water, even though some people might be rude about Sydney tap water. It's probably still preferable to muddy creek water. So, that is a possibility that they're also making that choice. The other potential explanation we thought about is whether they just feel safer drinking from drinking fountains. Because they're usually, or all of these, in this case, were in picnic areas or they're on the edge of sports fields. So, they're in open areas with really good visibility. They're off the ground. And maybe that feels much safer than going down to that waterhole where maybe the predators are lurking behind the bush. Belinda Smith: Part of me also wonders if there's some payoff to actually working for the water. It makes me think of shelling pistachios. Somehow, the pistachio tastes much better if you're the one cracking it open. And it's like that little bit of work has just made the reward so much more tasty. Lucy Aplin: Yes. That exact phenomenon you're describing does have a scientific name. You know, there's jargon for everything. Yes, great. It's called contra-freeloading. And it means that you'd rather work a little bit for your reward than get it for free. And it is something that has been observed in humans. And it's also been observed in captive parrots. Belinda Smith: Okay, so we've got bin lid flipping cockies. We've got water fountain drinking cockies. What other behaviours have been reported in cockatoos? Lucy Aplin: So one I find perhaps a little bit disturbing is that they seem to have taken a liking in some parts of Sydney to drinking discarded energy drink cans or soft drink cans. So if they find them on the ground or in the rubbish, they'll pick them up using their bill into the sort of hole, you know, the drinking hole and then tip it back to try and get the drugs. Belinda Smith: Oh, my gosh. A caffeinated cocky. Exactly. Just what you need. Lucy Aplin: That's why I find that one a little bit disturbing. I'm not sure what the effect of caffeine is on cockatoos, but I don't think it'd be good. And we have going along the same sort of high energy line, just like we have observations of noisy miners in Rainbow Larrakeet stealing sugar packets, cockatoos will also occasionally steal sugar packets. That's been reported to us. And another innovation which has been reported to us from the south of Sydney, from the Northern Territory, amazingly, from a little community right up in Arnhem Land and from a couple of sites up in far north of Sydney is what we're calling the lunch bag innovation. It's a bit hard to know how to label this one. It seems to involve cockatoos going to schools where the kids leave their bags outside the classroom, unzipping the bags, taking out the lunch boxes and then undoing the lunch boxes and running off with the sandwiches. Belinda Smith: Oh, that's so cheeky. OK, so why and how can these cockies do such amazing and often annoying things? Lucy Aplin: There's a few hypotheses that have been put forward. When we look at overall brain size across parrots, it seems like one thing that fits really well is what we call the cognitive buffer hypothesis. And it's this idea that if you live a long time, which parrots do, your environment's going to be changing around you, unless you're in a really stable environment. But parrots are often not in a really stable environment. The environment's changing and having a large brain allows them to cope with that change that they might experience during their life. So it provides a buffer to the sort of swings and arrows of fortune by allowing you to work out solutions to changes. And that sort of explanation for the evolution of intelligence in parrots, it's not the only one, but that hypothesis fits really nicely with the urban adaptability that we see because urban environments are that. They're changing, novel environments where things can change. They can be pretty stable, but then they can change really rapidly when the local government decides to change all of the drinking fountains or whatever. So having a big brain might allow you to cope with that by learning new solutions and adjusting your behaviour. Belinda Smith: Wow. Just like us humans then. And cockies don't just have big brains. They also have a lot of cells or neurons in those brains. Lucy Aplin: So a cockatoo has about the same total number of neurons. So just straight count, not accounting for differences in body size or anything, just straight count. The same total number of neurons or similar to a macaque monkey, which is a medium sized monkey. Wow. So they're really punching above their weight. Like literally? Belinda Smith: Yes. These behaviours, they're kind of quirky and fun and maybe a bit messy, but they're very interesting. But what does this tell us about cocky culture? Lucy Aplin: Well, it tells us that they're very capable of learning from each other, from social learning. We have no evidence for teaching, so they're not doing that. Watch out if they start. No evidence for that. But they are very capable of observing other individuals and adopting the behaviour if it's beneficial. And they're capable of transmitting that behaviour over quite large geographic areas. Some of the studies we're doing now, they're not published yet, so I don't have the full set of results. But our preliminary results from experimental work is showing that actually new beneficial behaviours can spread over, say, the entire city of Canberra within just a couple of weeks. So the way their society is organised is really promotes that rapid spread and population level adoption of new behaviours. So I think that tells us something about the secret to their success and something about their life history in general. These are the elephants of the bird world. They're really long-lived, they're really brainy, and they're really social. And so they have a society that we recognise and we can also understand. We can look at what they're doing and understand it better than with some other species. Belinda Smith: That was Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at the Australian National University. She and her colleagues published their study about the water fountain drinking cockies in the Royal Society Biology Letters last week. And thanks for listening to Lab Notes on ABC Radio National, where every week we dissect the science behind new discoveries and current events. I'm Belinda Smith. This episode was produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Menang Noongar people. Fiona Pepper's the producer and it was mixed by Angie Grant. We'll catch you next week.
ABC News
20-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Lab Notes: Why a metre is a metre long
Belinda Smith: Exactly 150 years ago, delegates from 17 countries gathered on a Parisian spring day to sign what may be one of the most important and influential treaties ever. It wasn't about politics or war or human rights. It was about the metre. Yeah, the metre. This Treaty of the metre would literally change how we measured the world, the universe around us, and transform trade and science. Because as history shows, if we're not talking the same measurement language, things can go terribly wrong. News Grab: I'm sorry to report that we have a serious problem with the Mars Climate Orbiter. We may in fact be facing a loss of mission. Belinda Smith: So how did this language of measurement come about? And how has it changed since that Treaty of the metre was signed all those years ago? Hi, I'm Belinda Smith, and you're listening to Lab Notes, the show that dissects the science behind new discoveries and current events. To explain how the definition of the metre has changed and why it all matters is Bruce Warrington from the National Measurement Institute, where he is CEO and Chief Metrologist. Now, first things first, well before the Treaty of the metre, someone had to come up with the idea of a metre. How did that happen? Bruce Warrington: Both the metre and the kilogram are French inventions. Belinda Smith: In the wake of the French Revolution of the late 1700s... Bruce Warrington: The new republic was trying for a particularly lofty and rational goal. They wanted the language of measurement that the new France would use to have a couple of key properties. It should be available to everybody at all time, and it should rest on the fundamental properties of nature. It should rest on something drawn from science, not from the length of the king's arm or something that changed over time. Belinda Smith: So if you can't use the king's arm, what can we use? Bruce Warrington: Their aim for the metre, they said, let's take the length of a line that runs from the North Pole to the equator on the meridian that goes through Paris, take that length, the length of that line, and divide it into 10 million pieces, and each piece is a metre. And the kilogram, by extension, came from, you take a box of a certain size measured in centimetres and fill it with pure water, and that becomes a kilogram. And so the kilogram comes from the metre in its original definition. Belinda Smith: Just working out how long that line would be from the North Pole to the equator through Paris just seems like a gigantic headache and logistical nightmare to me, let alone then divvy that up into 10 million bits, and there's your metre. That's, it seems wild to me. How do you even measure that? Bruce Warrington: It's a brave thing. It's a brave definition to go for, isn't it? Belinda Smith: Brave is one word for it, yep. Bruce Warrington: Well, they thought big, and they did want exactly, as we've said, something that wouldn't change. And so what they were essentially trying to do was draw on the best science of the day that they had for surveying. And so they really did try and figure out the length of that line by sending surveyors, not to do the whole thing, not to go all the way from the Pole to the equator, but to go from Dunkirk, so right at the northern part of France, all the way to Barcelona. And then by measuring part of that line, extrapolating it out by knowing how much longitude you'd covered, essentially. Belinda Smith: Quite the undertaking, and one that took a pair of astronomers seven years. Once they calculated the length of the metre, they took it to the French Academy of Sciences, who made a platinum bar, which they called the metre of the archive. Then in 1875, the Treaty of the Metre, or the Metre Convention, was signed in the metre's home country of France. Bruce Warrington: So the Metre Convention is the international agreement whereby the nations of the world work on the metric system. They kind of work to use a single language for measurement, for trade and for innovation, and to keep that system evolving to stay at the forefront of trade and technology. Belinda Smith: So a metre in Germany would be the same length as a metre in, say, Venezuela, two of the original signatories. Here in Australia, we weren't on board to begin with, because, you know, this all went down well before Federation, but we did sign on in 1947, which helped solve a few inconsistencies. Bruce Warrington: Part of the challenge as Australia was settled was speaking that same language between states, particularly, for example, railway gauges. You can see where disagreements or different approaches might cause you problems. Speaker 5: Australia badly needs a uniform gauge railway system. We have inherited as a nation 30,000 miles of different-sized railway lines, a muddled mess, a legacy of folly from the last century which has added hundreds of millions of pounds... Yeah, it Bruce Warrington: was all a bit of a dog's breakfast. And as manufacturing demanded more precise measurements, the definition of the metre also had to change. Belinda Smith: So early in the 20th century, science was understanding measurements using light. Bruce Warrington: Light travels in waves, and scientists can measure their wavelength, literally the length of the wave. So if you think of a metre as being divided into 100 centimetres or 1,000 millimetres, you can also divide it into 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of a very specific reddish-orange light. So in 1960, this became the definition of the metre. Bruce Warrington: It was more stable, it was more accurate. It's not subject to some of those things that can skew a measurement or a comparison. Belinda Smith: But the evolution of the metre didn't end there. Bruce Warrington: It essentially goes back to clocks. So in the interim between those two definitions, there'd been a lot of progress made on measuring time very accurately. And time today is still the quantity we can measure most accurately. Atomic clocks are the most accurate measurement standards. So if you have a clock with a very accurate second, and you fix the speed of light as a fundamental constant, so light travels this many metres in a second, then that essentially fixes the metre. You take that number, 299,792,458 is the number. That's how many metres light travels in a second. So you take the distance light travels in a second and divide it by that number, that's one metre. Belinda Smith: Okay, so by this point, we can put the definition of the metre conversation to bed because this is how the metre is defined today. And currently, more than 100 countries have signed the metre treaty, including some that seem to refuse to go fully metric. The US springs to mind. Bruce Warrington: There are one or two holdouts that you might know. Each country gets to choose exactly when it adopts that system. But even the United States, for example, has at the core of its civil measurement, the metric system. So its national standards are the kilogram and the metre, just like everybody else's. Belinda Smith: And now we have people like Bruce. He's one of hundreds of metrologists in Australia. Bruce Warrington: A metrologist is a measurement scientist. So meteorology is weather, that's something quite different. But a metrologist studies the science of measurement and how measurement can be applied to other sciences, to trade, to innovation generally. Belinda Smith: That includes doing things like calibrating equipment, you know, like weigh stations and the like. Bruce Warrington: It's that thing where you don't need to know about it, but somebody needs to know about it. For everybody to have the confidence for trade and for innovation to work. Belinda Smith: And metrologists don't just deal in metres and kilograms. A handful of other units of measurement were added to the treaty over the years, like the second and the ampere or amp, which is a measure of electrical current. These all form what's known as the International System of Units. You might know them as SI units. So why is it important to have these, including the metre, defined to such an exact level? Bruce Warrington: It comes down to what you can do with it. So if you are measuring distances across the earth, the accuracy of those surveying measurements originally was the challenge. You didn't necessarily need more accuracy than that. As you go through the industrial revolution and manufacturing starts to advance, you have to start thinking about tolerances for the big heavy engineering systems that you are designing and manufacturing and how much tolerance can you accept in a manufactured piece of equipment before it stops working. Belinda Smith: Today, the frontier for manufacturing is on the smallest of scales. Bruce Warrington: It's down at the level of billionths of a metre, nanometres or even smaller. So if you think about the scale of a transistor in an integrated circuit in your smartphone, it's of order nanometres. The physical scale of the electronic fabrication is at that level. So you need rulers that can check for the quality of that manufacturing at that level and can control manufacturing at that level. And so the old definition wouldn't do it, but laser interferometry, lasers as a way of using the new definition can. And so there's always a tension between our ability to measure something and our ability to make something. Belinda Smith: Precision is one thing. Making sure everyone uses the same measurements is equally important as engineers working on NASA's $300 million Mars Climate Orbiter discovered in the late 90s. Bruce Warrington: In the design of that probe, the thrusters for the probe, two different teams were speaking two different measurement languages. One was using kind of imperial units and one was using metric units. And so the satellite comes in too low and burns up. And so the whole thing's lost because people are not using the same language of measurement. Belinda Smith: So there are high stakes scenarios like that one, but there are also everyday measurement discrepancies, which, well, give Bruce the Bruce Warrington: irrits. If you're cooking or baking, for example, then what's a teaspoon, what's a tablespoon, what's a cup can also change. And I find it slightly frustrating as a professional measurement nerd that an Australian tablespoon is four teaspoons, whereas almost everywhere else in the rest of the world, it's three teaspoons. And so- Belinda Smith: See, I didn't know that. Bruce Warrington: It is. So an Australian tablespoon is 20 mils, 20 milliliters. And most of other places use 15 milliliters. So what that means is if you're cooking something, then you might need to know whether the recipe came from Australia or came from somewhere else to get the tablespoon right. Belinda Smith: You've just blown my mind. That is, oh my gosh, okay, wow. Because that's a whole other layer. Like you said, a cup is not a cup. We've got two sets of measuring cups. They're not the same. The one cup is not the same. And so it drives me nuts. I'm like, do I go the big cup or the smaller cup? Which is why I like it when recipes have weights, they say, you know. There you Bruce Warrington: go. You see, that is the metric system. If you use milliliters and grams, it's absolutely unambiguous. And so even in something as simple as a recipe, if you're not sure, then you can get in trouble. Belinda Smith: That was Bruce Warrington, CEO and Chief Metrologist of the National Measurement Institute. And thanks for listening to Lab Notes on ABC Radio National, where every week we dissect the science behind new discoveries and current events. I'm Belinda Smith. This episode was produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Menang Noongar people. Fiona Pepper's the producer, and it was mixed by Riley Mellis. What science-y story would you like us to get under the bonnet of? Send us an email, labnotes at We'll catch you next week.
