Aussie birds show their hidden colours when fleeing danger

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-07-28 09:01

Australia; International

Image by Geraldine Rose from Pixabay

Aussie birds that display bright colours when fleeing danger may use it to confuse predators rather than startle them, suggest international researchers, who say that the colour display (called a flash-display) causes predators to believe that the fleeing animal is a different one to their target. The team built a computer model of birds with and without flash-displays fleeing from human predators, finding that birds with flash-displays had better survival if they fled from further away. They tested this in the real world with Australian birds, finding that birds with flash-displays would flee from a further distance than non-flash-display birds. The researchers suggest that fleeing from further away increases the chance that a predator will believe the bright coloured bird is a different bird when it is at rest.

Media release

From: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Feeling flashy - The anti-predation benefit of flash displays is related to the distance at which the prey initiates its escape

Many animals have conspicuous colours that are only displayed when mobile. One explanation is that the display makes it harder for a predator to relocate the signaller once it has resettled. This illusion will work best if the predator has not seen the prey at rest. To test the idea, we developed a simple computer game which found that only virtual prey that fled before human predators could see them at rest benefited from having flash displays. In support, Australian bird species with hidden colours tend to take flight from a longer distance than those species without the displays.

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Carleton University, Canada

Funder: C.K. was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (grant no. 2019R1C1C1002466). T.N.S. is funded by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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