How voluptuous is the baby bird? This chick grows a terrifying beak to feed its parents

The colorful bird is native to Australia. This bird is definitely worthy of the title of "colorful". They are very colorful.

However, this beauty brought them misfortune. From 1897, Australian colonists began to capture a large number of species unique to Australia and export them all over the world, including birds, and one-third of the exported birds were Colorful bird.

Unsurprisingly, the colorful birds were pushed to the brink of extinction. They belong to the plum family, which is widely distributed around the world. There are currently 134 species described, and the colorful birds are the only ones listed as "" endangered" species.

Although the colorful birds are very beautiful and very popular, if you have seen their chicks, you will definitely be startled by them, because the beaks of the colorful birds are considered by many to be the most terrifying in the world Bird mouth.

They have brightly colored papillae around their mouths and black markings inside their mouths, which can easily trigger our intensive phobias when they open their mouths wide.

The structure of the colorful bird chick is composed of keratin, the same material as our nails and hair. As their feathers grow, the bright papillae will disappear.

In fact, many animals will grow similar papillae around or inside their mouths to assist them with feeding or other activities, but colorful and interesting ones like the colorful wenbird are relatively rare.

So, why do the chicks of the colorful bird have such a strange mouth structure? How will this help them?

Although rhododendrons are beneficial birds to humans, they have an outrageous behavior. They do not build their own nests, but prefer to lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and let other birds help them hatch and breed. raise offspring.

And the hosts they choose are basically those smaller birds, so when the chicks of the cuckoo gradually grow up, there will be a very small mother bird who is working hard to feed a "giant baby" cuckoo. Contrast phenomenon.

In fact, not only cuckoos have this behavior, there are many birds in the bird world who play like this, and the birds that suffer the most include the plum finches.

In the Plum Finch, almost all the species described so far are similar to the colorful finches, and their chicks basically have a very unique beak structure.

So, the researchers initially thought that this behavior of the plum finch chicks was a defensive measure to differentiate themselves from the parasitic chicks, allowing their biological parents to recognize and feed them.

Since the African plumeria finch is the most parasitized group, and the mouths of their parasitic chicks also show similar characteristics to the host chicks, which confirms this view.

Because evolution will never stop, two species can only keep co-evolution, you have a good plan, I must have a wall ladder, otherwise I will be frustrated or even extinct.

However, no parasitic birds have been found in the plum finches in Asia and Australia. For example, our protagonist today, the colorful bird, they are parasitic chicks that do not specifically parasitize them, and may never even have them, but they still have A strange mouth.

In fact, the foreseeable reason may also be to hope to get more feeding from your parents, but science can't just guess, it also needs experimental data.

Strange mouth increases chance of feeding

For the plum finches, their chicks are very introverted, and these birds are not very large, but they are very reproductive - they just rely on having more babies to hedge against others. unfavorable factors.

All plum finches will lay 5-10 eggs at the same time in a litter, and when these chicks break out together, their parents may not be able to raise all the chicks to large.

Therefore, the competition between chicks begins from the moment they break the shell. They will try their best to attract the attention of their parents, opening their mouths a little wider and calling them louder. The purpose is to hope that their parents can feed themselves more many.

However, for a large family like the plum finches, with so many siblings, the chicks may not be able to rely on mouth openings and calls alone, so they also need some other skills.

These strange structures on their mouths may have evolved under this pressure, drawing their parents' attention with their brighter, distinctive mouths and feeding themselves more.

There are currently two experiments to confirm this conclusion:

One is that the researchers found that the unique mouths of the plum finches help parents find and feed themselves accurately in a variety of conditions.

We can see that the papillae in the mouths of the chicks are very bright, and these protrusions can reflect some specific light, which acts like an indicator light on an airport runway, directing parents to feed food into their mouths .

In a 2005 study, Cornell University scientist Justin Schuetz altered the beak shape of plum finches by painting the white spots black.

The results of the experiment showed that although the blackened chicks were not driven out of their nests, they ate significantly less than the unpigmented chicks.

Another is that some researchers have found that unhealthy chicks have more drab beaks and less prominent patterns and mastoids than healthy chicks.

Since these papillae and patterns of chicks grow very fast, doubling every few days, parents may judge which chicks are more worthy of investment based on these differences in beak shape - eating more will eat more.

Those chicks that don't grow fast enough are basically no different from having their mouths painted with black paint. They eat less and less, and in the case of insufficient food, they end up being abandoned.

It's not hard to find that, for whatever reason - distinguishing species, health, position in the nest, or maybe some other factor, the variegated finches or the chicks of the whole plum finches really have this strange beak. Helping them get more feeding from their parents.

So, as they mature -- their feathers are perfecting -- this structure for feeding is gone, and they don't put energy into it.

at last

As we all know, the competition between different organisms in nature is very fierce. In order for an organism to survive, it must better adapt to its prey and predators.

But in fact, the competition between the same creatures is equally fierce, and almost all creatures are the same, and this competition begins from the moment of birth.