Latest news with #DustinRubenstein
The Independent
26-05-2025
- Science
- The Independent
These birds form life-long friendships just like humans, study finds
Almost two decades of research shows strong evidence of long-term friendship among African starlings, a discovery that sheds fresh light on helping behaviour in the animal kingdom. Animals often help direct blood relatives due to a natural tendency to promote their genes, a phenomenon known as ' kin selection'. Humans routinely deviate from this behaviour and form lifelong friendships with even non-relatives. In the case of animals, though, this kind of cooperation is far harder to establish as it requires collecting and examining large amounts of data over years. But a new study, published in the journal Nature, reveals that African starlings, a diverse group of birds known for their vibrant colours, do exhibit this kind of long-term friendship. Drawing on nearly 20 years of observational data, the study concludes that while the starlings do preferentially help their relatives, many also help non-relatives. 'Although we detected kin-biased helping, non-kin helping was common despite opportunities to aid kin,' the study notes. The non-relative helping behaviour occurs through the formation of reciprocal helping relationships, which tend to take place over many years. 'Starling societies aren't just simple families, they are much more complex, containing a mixture of related and unrelated individuals that live together, much in the way that humans do,' according to study co-author Dustin Rubenstein. Researchers studied thousands of interactions between hundreds of African starlings and collected DNA from individual birds to examine their genetic relationships. Overall, they collected behavioural and genetic data from 40 breeding seasons. They found that starlings preferentially aided relatives but also consistently helped specific non-relative birds even when relatives were available to help. 'Unexpectedly, specific pairs maintained long-term reciprocal helping relationships by swapping social roles across their lifetimes,' they noted. The findings challenge the prevalent view of helping in the animal kingdom purely as a form of altruism due to kin selection. 'Our next step is to explore how these relationships form, how long they last, why some relationships stay robust, while others fall apart,' Dr Rubenstein said. 'I think this kind of reciprocal helping behaviour 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.'
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
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Starlings form ‘friendships' to help each other with breeding, study finds
Birds of a feather flock together, so the saying goes. But scientists studying the behaviour of starlings have found their ability to give and take makes their relationships closer to human friendships than previously thought. About 10% of bird species and 5% of mammal species breed 'cooperatively', meaning some individuals refrain from breeding to help others care for their offspring. Some species even help those they are unrelated to. Now researchers studying superb starlings have found the support cuts both ways, with birds that received help in feeding or guarding their chicks returning the favour when the 'helper' bird has offspring of its own. Prof Dustin Rubenstein, a co-author of the study from the University of Colombia, said such behaviour was probably necessary for superb starlings as they live in a harsh environment where drought is common and food is limited. 'Two birds probably can't feed their offspring on their own, so they need these helpers to help them,' he said, adding that as each breeding pair produces few offspring, birds must be recruited from outside the family group to help the young survive. 'What happens is the non-relatives come into the group, and they breed pretty quickly, usually in the first year, maybe the second year, and then they take some time off and some of the other birds breed – and we never understood why,' said Rubenstein. 'But they're forming these pairwise reciprocal relationships, in the sense that I might help you this year, and then you'll help me in the future.' The results chime with previous work from Rubenstein and colleagues that found superb starlings living in larger groups have a greater chance of survival and of producing offspring, with the new work suggesting the give-and-take approach helps to stabilise these groups. Writing in the journal Nature, Rubenstein and colleagues report how they studied superb starlings at 410 nests in Kenya spanning nine social groups, recording data over a 20-year period from 2002 that covered more than 40 breeding seasons. The team also collected DNA from 1,175 birds to explore their relationships to each other. The results reveal that rather than helping birds at random, starlings preferentially helped breeding birds that were related to them, particularly if they were born in the same nest. However, they also helped unrelated breeding birds, even when there were opportunities to help relatives. The team found helpers tended to aid specific breeding birds. Crucially, these pairs of breeders and helpers often switched roles from one breeding season to the next – particularly if they were immigrants to the group. 'You can think of them as friendships, in the sense that they're not relatives,' said Rubenstein. However, Rubenstein said questions remained. 'Why don't they just get the help and then not reciprocate the help in the future?' he said, adding the team was collecting further data to explore the conundrum. The team said that while studies often focused on how helping a family member promoted the chance of the helpers' genes being passed due to shared ancestry, the new work showed helping– including between non-relatives – could bring other benefits. Dr Julia Schroeder, an expert in behavioural ecology at Imperial College London who was not involved in the work, said the research supported the idea that birds could recognise each other individually, and confirmed previous suspicions that they engaged in this give-and-take behaviour. 'It helps us better understand altruism and the evolution of altruism, because it's still a bit of a mystery,' she said.
