Colour biases are a question of conspecifics’ taste
Section snippets
Subjects and Housing
Forty-five domestic chicks, Gallus gallus domesticus, that were hatched in the laboratory served as experimental subjects in experiment 1 (30 experimental chicks and 15 demonstrator chicks; see below for details); and a further 24 served as experimental subjects in experiment 2 (16 experimental chicks and eight demonstrator chicks). ‘Experimental chicks’ observed the responses of ‘demonstrator chicks’ to either a palatable or a bitter solution. The food colour preferences of experimental chicks
Results
All of the experimental birds went on to attack 16 of the coloured crumbs after observing the demonstrator (but not the substance that elicited the demonstrator’s response). An attack was either pecking or eating a crumb since both these behaviours show a clear food choice. In experiment 1, the number of red crumbs attacked differed between the two experimental groups: birds in the Bitrex group attacked significantly fewer red crumbs than birds in the Water group (Mann–Whitney test: U = 25.5, N1 = N
Discussion
These experiments clearly demonstrate that observing a conspecific’s distaste response causes naïve birds to bias their foraging preferences away from red and yellow crumbs (colours typically associated with insect warning patterns) and towards food of a more neutral colour (green). This is despite the fact that the disgust responses of birds’ conspecifics were not associated with any particular colour signal. Furthermore, the number of distaste responses that demonstrators performed was
Acknowledgments
I thank Michelle Waddle and Lin Hedgecock for looking after the birds and Cheryl Crozier for help in the laboratory. This work was supported by a Lloyd’s Tercentenary Foundation Fellowship.
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