Would You Jump Off a 300 Foot Cliff If Your Dad Said Do It? These Crazy Chicks Will
Before they have the wing span to actually permit them to fly, young guillemots (also known as murres) leap hundreds of metres off towering cliffs and flutter down towards the sea, guided by their fathers. Scientists have long wondered why these tiny chicks make this remarkable leap, hoping to avoid the rocks below them, in what seems an unlikely survival strategy for a species.
It had earlier been suggested that murre offspring headed off to sea once the chicks reached about one-quarter of their adult size and were large enough to defend themselves from potential predators and too large to be fed at the colony. So that this seemingly death-defying behaviour could be better understood as being, in some ways, a tradeoff between the safety offered in the colony and fast growth rates at sea, where more food is available.
Credit: Knud Falk
But after tracking the behaviour of murre fathers and their offspring for six weeks in murre colonies in some of the most remote locations on the globe, in Nunavut, Greenland, and islands off Newfoundland, scientists have discovered that mortality rates were similar between chicks at sea and in the colonies.
Just after the jump — a father who lost his offspring during the leap off the cliffs followed by another father whose chick survived the descent.
Credit: Kyle Elliott
The dads work hard while the mothers stay home and party
Credit: Kyle Elliott
Making sense of a death-defying leap
“Once you know that there are both higher growth rates for the chicks at sea, and similar survival rates compared with life in the colony, it then makes sense to see this seemingly death-defying leap as a win-win strategy when it comes to survival,” says Kyle Elliott, the lead author on a paper on the subject that was published online March 8 in The American Naturalist. Elliott teaches in McGill University’s Department of Natural Resource Sciences. “We would never have been able to discover this without using the kind of state-of-the-art recorders that are now available and provide a glimpse into the life of murres on the high seas.”
Contacts and sources:
Chris Chipello
Citation: ”Variation in Growth Drives the Duration of Parental Care: A Test of Ydenberg’s Model,” by Kyle H. Elliott et al in The American Naturalist: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691097
Source:
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