Beachcomber: 101 years old and still as altruistic as a bird...
SPRAYING birds with hormones may not be everyone’s idea of a good night out but a paper that has just appeared in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters journal shows what it can achieve.
Entitled Mesotocin Influences Pinyon Jay Prosociality, the paper reports an experiment in which caged birds could influence which trays of food were given to them and another bird.
The subject of the experiment was in the middle cage of three.
On one side it had an empty cage, on the other side there was a cage with another jay in it.
By choosing which of two wires to peck at, it had one of two trays pushed towards it.
Each tray bore two feeding plates which might contain worms.
So it chose whether feeding plates became available to the experimental jay and its friend in the neighbouring cage, or to itself and the empty cage.
The experiments were performed both before and after squirting the bird’s nose with mesotocin, which is a hormone known to increase sociability and generosity in many species of bird.
The results showed that jays dosed with the hormone were far more likely to reward their neighbours than they had been before being given the hormone.
This however was only the case if the bird doing the experiment was also rewarded.
Even hormones could not make them interested in getting food for their neighbour if they didn’t get any themselves.
I popped over to Nebraska where the experiment was done and waited for a moment when I could be alone with a jay that had taken part in the research, I asked what he thought of it.
“They’ve missed the point entirely,” he said dismissively.
“In what way?” I asked.
“They haven’t seen it from our point of view at all,” he said. “They don’t even mention my snorting.”
“Snorting what and when?” I asked.
“Let me explain,” he said patiently. “All I want is to get as many worms as possible, OK?”
“What’s that got to do with snorting?” I asked.
“I’m coming to that,” he said. “Now just suppose I do what the researchers want, being nice and altruistic, getting worms for myself and my neighbour, and him doing the same for me when he has the chance, and both of us being even more generous when we’re sprayed with hormones. Well what do you think happens then?”
“Everyone goes home happy,” I said.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “Researchers go home and we get no more worms. Have you read the 2011 paper by Barraza and others on the effect of oxytocin infusions on people?”
“Remind me,” I said.
“Subjects played a game giving them the chance to win money. Then they were invited to donate some of their winnings to charity. People dosed with oxytocin gave more money. So when the experimenters tried to squirt mesotocin, which is the avian equivalent, up my nose, I tried to snort it back at them to make them give me more worms.”
“More research is clearly needed,” I said, and the bird bobbed its head in agreement saying: “And more worms”.