New Study into Social Structure of Parrots

[Wolf]

Just found this little gem:
http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx? ... &mkt=en-us

Also found this one:

http://phys.org/news/2014-04-loneliness ... tml#inlRlv

[liz]

What's a telomere?

I was right then to think Sweetie was a matriarch. That would put Shadow at Alpha and the reason Tommy lost out.

[Wolf]

A telomere is a repetitive neucleotide sequence at each end of a chromosome which serves to protect it from deterioration or fusion with neighboring chromsomes. It is from two greek word which together mean end part.

[Pajarita]

Yes, what Wolf said but to make it easier, it's a buffer zone that protects the chromosome so each time something happens (like stress, disease, age or whatever) and it needs to 'renew' itself, it's a bit smaller, and the smaller it gets, the less time you have to live. So short telomeres means short life.

[Wolf]

Right !!

[shiraartain]

Fascinating articles! Would it be possible to establish a "Parrot Studies" Thread in which members can share such things?

[Wolf]

Do you mean like Parrot Tales or General and off Topic or like a sticky thread ? I would think that such a thing would have to be approved and set up by Michael. I kind of like your idea, personally.

[patti]

I thought this was really interesting, and agree that a research thread might be a great idea. I specialize in social analysis of humans and could maybe contribute in a year or so once my life settles down.

One thing i thought was interesting was that aggression was part of the social structure only in the captive birds. It says this in the write-up, but you can tell from the video that this researcher seemed to have generalized this finding to the birds in general.... i hope not. This difference could be a very important finding and shouldn't be glossed over.

this makes me wonder about the importance assigned to aggression, too. I would need more convincing. Humans tend to romanticize aggression, and I hope that the research team is not doing that here. They are equating social structure with heirarchy of dominance/submissive relationships. Like reseachers do with all animals. I suspect that it is really we humans that make dominance structures central to our social lives. As pajarita said in an earlier post, parrots have a capacity for love that we humans do not understand. That is what is important.

Network analysis quantifies connections between birds - lines and dots with attached descriptors - but gives little qualitative information. Birds are smart, and their interactions have shared meanings that probably structure the interaction and their whole lives more than just simple bonding and biting. Someone needs to call in Segourney Weaver with her notebook and hiking boots. just sayin.

[Wolf]

With the exception of this study all of my information is that in their natural habitat that aggression is not a part of a parrots social structure.

[Pajarita]

And I'll add one more layer to this, something I've observed in my birdroom and which I have stated for many years (although I have no scientific evidence to prove it): not only aggression is not seen in wild birds, I don't think it's captivity per se that makes it present in pet parrots, I think it's the cages that do it. Birds that don't live in cages might have a predilection for one bird and a dislike for another but it never gets to the point that they actually fight or hurt one another. They simply stay out of each other's ways and that's the end of that!