
There's nothing that ruins a sunset walk on the boardwalk like a flock of greedy seagulls circling your funnel cake. Before you start to imagine yourself under attack in a sea of Hitchcock-esque pecks and flapping wings, remember that science has your back. New research has a strategy for protecting your food next time you're at the beach. Just give them your best death stare.
The feathered thieves are much more likely to go for the theft when they can swoop in unseen, avoiding eye contact with their victim, as the Irish Times reported. Staring at the birds makes them much less likely to steal your food, found the study, "Herring Gulls Respond To Human Gaze Direction" published in the journal Biology Letters.
"Gulls are often seen as aggressive and willing to take food from humans, so it was interesting to find that most wouldn't even come near during our tests," said lead author Madeleine Goumas, from of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter's Penryn Campus, as the BBC reported. "Of those that did approach, most took longer when they were being watched. Some wouldn't even touch the food at all, although others didn't seem to notice that a human was staring at them."
The researchers conducted their study at various popular spots along the English coast. They put just over half a pound of french fries in a bag on the ground and waited to see how long it would take the gulls to nab them. The scientist then crouched down a short distance away from the bag of fries and timed how long it took for a gull to take the first peck. In half the experiments, the researcher faced the bird head on, in the other half they turned away, according to the Independent.
"On average, gulls took 21 seconds longer to approach the food with a human staring at them," according to a university press release. Yet, the bigger surprise may have been how few gulls actually went for Goumas' fries. She initially tried to test 74 herring gulls, but only 19 of them, or 26 percent, went for the food.
"The effect was clearer with some individuals than others," Goumas said, as The Guardian reported. "For the most part the gulls were wary of me when I was watching them, but there were a few individuals that were quick to approach even when I was looking at them."
The researchers offered some takeaways not only for beachgoers, but anyone around gulls as the birds start to move their way into urban centers.
"Our study took place in coastal towns in Cornwall, and especially now, during the summer holidays and beach barbecues, we are seeing more gulls looking for an easy meal," said Neeltje Boogert, an author on the paper, in a press release. "We therefore advise people to look around themselves and watch out for gulls approaching, as they often appear to take food from behind, catching people by surprise. It seems that just watching the gulls will reduce the chance of them snatching your food."
Goumas added, "People can take steps to prevent it. When you eat, being against a wall that blocks a gull's access from behind, or just keeping an eye out, being more vigilant, reduces your chances of having your food taken," as The Guardian reported.
Next, the researchers will examine how eating humans' food affects gulls and their chicks in the long term, according to a University of Exeter press release.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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