Random Impulse: Week 9-2

In my Animal Behavior class I learned about the mafia hypothesis in the bird world, and I thought I’ll write about it in my random impulse this week because it was quite interesting (and a bit disturbing as well). Apparently, some birds don’t look after their own eggs; they are too lazy to build their own nests. So instead once the female lays her eggs she finds another species (that is usually smaller than her) nest to incubate her eggs. The cowbird is a type of bird that shows such a parasitic behavior. The female cowbird will roam around the neighborhood and find an appropriate nest to keep her eggs. Then she will terrorize the owner of that nest to make sure her eggs are incubated. The smaller bird species has no choice but to look after the cowbirds eggs if she wants to live in the neighborhood.  So the cowbird is like the mafia, terrorizing others in the neighborhood to get their work done. It gets a bit gruesome, when there are no new nests available for the cowbird to lay their eggs. In such an instance a cowbird will throw away the baby birds in another nest to get that bird species to lay new eggs, so that the cowbird female can get her eggs incubated as well. I thought it was interesting that such a behavior that is prevalent in humans continues to exist in the bird world as well.