Clever Cockie Project
Aplin (CCE) Lab
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Cognitive and Social Ecology of Parrots
We recently published a paper in Current Biology asking whether cockatoos and humans are engaged in an arms race over bins. This follows our 2021 paper in Science on the bin-opening innovation in cockatoos. If you would like to read an openly accessible version of these papers, please click here & here
1. Cognitive Urban Ecology
Despite their extremely slow life history, cockatoos have become successful urban adaptors, thriving in novel environments. How have they done so, and what is the role of cognition? This is the puzzle we are trying to answer with the clever-cockie project. We use a range of methods to gain insight into their urban ecology. Large-scale patterns are derived from citizen science reports in the Big-City-Birds App. We GPS tag birds to understand how they move through urban habitats. Finally, we are conduct detailed observations of feeding ecology, and conducting wild behavioural experiments with habituated birds.
Further reading:
Farine, Penndorf, Bolcato, Nyaguthii & Aplin. Low-cost animal tracking using Bluetooh low energy beacons on a crowd-sourced network. Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Fehlmann, Martin, Safi & Aplin. Wild sulphur-crested cockatoos match human activity rhythms to access food in the urban environment. Urban Ecology
Klump, Major, Farine, Martin & LM Aplin. Is bin-opening in cockatoos leading to an innovation arms race with humans? Current Biology.
Klump, Martin, Wild, Hörsch, Major & LM Aplin. Innovation and geographic spread of a complex foraging culture in an urban parrot. Science.
Behavioural experiments with wild habituated cockatoos
Big City Birds App
Citizen scientists can report sightings and observations of behaviour of sulphur-crested cockatoos.https://www.spotteron.com/bigcitybirds/info
Citizen science report of 4 wing-tagged birds. Spatial/temporal occurrences in reports are used to build social networks.
Social network of cockatoos over 1 year. Colour shows roosting locations
2. Social cognition and social networks
Sulphur-crested cockatoos are thought to be one of the most cognitively complex bird species, on par with Eurasian ravens or capuchin monkeys. Yet little is known about whether they exhibit a corresponding high degree of social complexity. In previous work, we used citizen science reports to measure social networks of wing-tagged birds. We showed that birds maintained social associations over multiple years, increased in social stability with age. In our current work, we are habituating birds and making detailed observations of their social interactions, within and between roosting groups.
Further reading:
Penndorf, Martin, Farine & Aplin. Social decision-making in a wild parrot relies on both individual recognition and intrinsic markers. BioRXiv.
Penndorf, Ewart, Klump, Martin & Aplin (2022). Multi-network analysis reveals context-dependent kin relationships in wild sulphur-crested cockatoos, Cacatua galerita, Journal of Animal Ecology.
Aplin et al. (2020) A citizen science approach reveals long-term social network structure in the an urban parrot, Cacatua galerita, Journal of Animal Ecology.
3. Comparative Approaches
Parrots are famous both for their life-span and for their intelligence, and represent an independent evolution of extreme longevity and cognition. We are expanding the scope of our work to encompass all parrots, comparing between species to give insight into comparitive evolution. To do this, we are collaborating with Species 360 to use their extensive zoo-database to understand life-history factors that might have driven evolution of brain size, sociality and longevity across 290 species of parrots.
Further reading:
Smeele et al. & Aplin (2022) Coevolution of relative brain size and longevity in parrots. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Parrot family tree, with redder branches representing species with extended longevity
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