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Antarctic skuas recognize individual humans

Cited 13 time in wos
Cited 14 time in scopus
Title
Antarctic skuas recognize individual humans
Authors
Lee, Won Young
Han, Yeong-Deok
Lee, Sang-im
Jablonski, Piotr G.
Jung, Jin-Woo
Kim, Jeong-Hoon
Subject
Zoology
Keywords
Antarctic birdBrown SkuaCognitionHuman RecognitionPre-exposureBehavioral Sciences
Issue Date
2014
Citation
Lee, Won Young, et al. 2014. "Antarctic skuas recognize individual humans". Animal Cognition, 19(4): 861-865.
Abstract
Recent findings report that wild animals can recognize individual humans. To explain how the animals distinguish humans, two hypotheses are proposed. The high cognitive abilities hypothesis implies that pre-existing high intelligence enabled animals to acquire such abilities. The pre-exposure to stimuli hypothesis suggests that frequent encounters with humans promote the acquisition of discriminatory abilities in these species. Here, we examine individual human recognition abilities in a wild Antarctic species, the brown skua (Stercorarius antarcticus), which lives away from typical human settlements and was only recently exposed to humans due to activities at Antarctic stations. We found that, as nest visits were repeated, the skua parents responded at further distances and were more likely to attack the nest intruder. Also, we demonstrated that seven out of seven breeding pairs of skuas selectively responded to a human nest intruder with aggression and ignored a neutral human who had not previously approached the nest. The results indicate that Antarctic skuas, a species that typically inhabited in human-free areas, are able to recognize individual humans who disturbed their nests. Our findings generally support the high cognitive abilities hypothesis, but this ability can be acquired during a relatively short period in the life of an individual as a result of interactions between individual birds and humans.
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-0970-9
Type
Article
Appears in Collections  
2014-2016, Long-Term Ecological Researches on King George Island to Predict Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change (14-16) / Hong; Soon Gyu (PE14020; PE15020; PE16020)
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