Let’s Talk Turkey: 8 Surprising Facts About Turkeys

A reposting of an article from November 24, 2014.

A wild male turkey struts his stuff.
Photo by Lupin at Wikimedia Commons.

1. Turkeys are all-American. The modern domesticated turkey is descended from the wild turkey of North America, which is essentially a pheasant.

2. Domestic turkeys can’t fly or have sex. Domestic turkeys have been bred to have enormous breast muscles for our dinner tables. Their breast muscles have become so large that these top-heavy birds have lost the ability to fly and even to have sex! Domestic turkey eggs now have to be fertilized by artificial insemination. Wild turkeys with their functionally-sized breast muscles, however, can fly up to 55 mph for short distances and have sex just fine.

3. Male turkeys (called toms) are courtship-machines. Wild turkey males are substantially larger than females, and their 5,000 to 6,000 feathers have red, purple, green, copper, bronze, and gold iridescence. Like peacocks, male turkeys puff up their bodies and spread their elaborate feathers to attract mates and intimidate rivals. In comparison, female wild turkey feathers are duller shades of brown and grey to better hide from predators. And as if their flashy feathers weren’t enough, toms also have fleshy body appendages called snoods (the fleshy snotsicle that hangs over their beak) and wattles (the thing that looks like a scrotum under their chin). When the male is excited, the snood and wattle fill with blood and turn bright red. Sexy!

4. Turkeys are intelligent animals. They even have the ability to learn the precise details of a 1,000-acre area. And no, turkeys will not drown if they look up into the sky during a rainstorm.

5. Turkeys are social animals. They create lasting social bonds with each other and are very affectionate. Turkeys can produce over 20 different vocalizations, including the distinctive gobble (produced only by males), which can be heard up to a mile away! Individual turkeys have unique voices that they use to recognize each other.

6. Female turkeys (called hens) are good moms. Wild turkey babies (called poults) are precocial, which means that they hatch out of their eggs already covered in fluffy down and able to walk, run and feed themselves. They stick close to their mother for protection from predators, but unlike many other species of bird mothers, she doesn't have to feed them. Although wild turkeys roost in the trees at night to avoid predators, poults are unable to fly for their first few weeks of life. The mother stays with them at ground level to keep them safe and warm until they are strong enough to all roost in the trees with her.


A wild turkey mom and her poults. Photo by Kevin Cole at Wikimedia Commons.

7. Ben Franklin wanted the turkey to be America’s national bird. Benjamin Franklin famously argued that the wild turkey, not the bald eagle, should be America's national bird. In a letter to his daughter, he wrote, "For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly...like those among men who live by sharping and robbing...he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little king-bird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district...For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours...".

8. Turkeys were once endangered. Although millions of wild turkeys used to live across the Americas, they were almost completely wiped out due to a combination of over-hunting and habitat destruction. Thanks to strong conservation efforts that included better hunting management, habitat protection, captive breeding, and reintroduction into the wild, wild turkey populations are now healthy and found in all of the lower 48 states.

Let’s Talk Turkey: 8 Surprising Facts About Turkeys

A wild male turkey struts his stuff.
Photo by Lupin at Wikimedia Commons.

1. Turkeys are all-American. The modern domesticated turkey is descended from the wild turkey of North America, which is essentially a pheasant.

2. Domestic turkeys can’t fly or have sex. Domestic turkeys have been bred to have enormous breast muscles for our dinner tables. Their breast muscles have become so large that these top-heavy birds have lost the ability to fly and even to have sex! Domestic turkey eggs now have to be fertilized by artificial insemination. Wild turkeys with their functionally-sized breast muscles, however, can fly up to 55 mph for short distances and have sex just fine.

3. Male turkeys (called toms) are courtship-machines. Wild turkey males are substantially larger than females, and their 5,000 to 6,000 feathers have red, purple, green, copper, bronze, and gold iridescence. Like peacocks, male turkeys puff up their bodies and spread their elaborate feathers to attract mates and intimidate rivals. In comparison, female wild turkey feathers are duller shades of brown and grey to better hide from predators. And as if their flashy feathers weren’t enough, toms also have fleshy body appendages called snoods (the fleshy snotsicle that hangs over their beak) and wattles (the thing that looks like a scrotum under their chin). When the male is excited, the snood and wattle fill with blood and turn bright red. Sexy!

4. Turkeys are intelligent animals. They even have the ability to learn the precise details of a 1,000-acre area. And no, turkeys will not drown if they look up into the sky during a rainstorm.

5. Turkeys are social animals. They create lasting social bonds with each other and are very affectionate. Turkeys can produce over 20 different vocalizations, including the distinctive gobble (produced only by males), which can be heard up to a mile away! Individual turkeys have unique voices that they use to recognize each other.

6. Female turkeys (called hens) are good moms. Wild turkey babies (called poults) are precocial, which means that they hatch out of their eggs already covered in fluffy down and able to walk, run and feed themselves. They stick close to their mother for protection from predators, but unlike many other species of bird mothers, she doesn't have to feed them. Although wild turkeys roost in the trees at night to avoid predators, poults are unable to fly for their first few weeks of life. The mother stays with them at ground level to keep them safe and warm until they are strong enough to all roost in the trees with her.


A wild turkey mom and her poults. Photo by Kevin Cole at Wikimedia Commons.

7. Ben Franklin wanted the turkey to be America’s national bird. Benjamin Franklin famously argued that the wild turkey, not the bald eagle, should be America's national bird. In a letter to his daughter, he wrote, "For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly...like those among men who live by sharping and robbing...he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little king-bird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district...For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours...".

8. Turkeys were once endangered. Although millions of wild turkeys used to live across the Americas, they were almost completely wiped out due to a combination of over-hunting and habitat destruction. Thanks to strong conservation efforts that included better hunting management, habitat protection, captive breeding, and reintroduction into the wild, wild turkey populations are now healthy and found in all of the lower 48 states.

We Are Each A Community



Lactobacillus (the purple rod-shaped things)
is a common bacterial species in reproductive
tracts. Image by Janice Carr from the
CDC at Wikimedia Commons.

In our world of antibacterial soaps, we have learned that bacteria are evil, dirty, sickness-causing agents to be eliminated at all costs. Although some bacteria can cause sickness, bacteria in general are actually a critical component of animal bodies. A human body has ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells and a hundred times as many bacterial genes as human genes, and this pattern is likely true for most animals. We animals have bacterial communities living on our skin, fur, feathers, scales and exoskeletons. We have bacteria in our guts, respiratory systems and reproductive tracts. And bacteria live in glands that are specialized for grooming or scent communication. These bacteria play critical roles not just in how our bodies work, but also in how we behave.

This week at Accumulating Glitches I talk about how all animals (including ourselves) include a community of microbes, such as bacteria. Even more amazing is that many of these bacteria are critical for our health and behavior. Check it out here.

And to learn more, check this out:

Archie, E.A., & Theis, K.R. (2011). Animal behaviour meets microbial ecology Animal Behaviour, 82, 425-436 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.029

The Craptastic Conversations of the Black Rhinoceros

What are you saying with your smells? Image by freedigitalphotos.net.

Animals communicate in all kinds of ways: with vocalizations, body language, vibrations, and even odors. In fact, compared to most species, we are pathetic in our abilities to communicate with body odor. With just a whiff of eau de crotch, many animals can decipher that individual’s species, sex, age, health status, reproductive status, emotional state, and dietary history. Some species can go so far as to make out that individual’s exact identity (*Sniff Sniff* Oh! Hi Mike!).

There are a lot of advantages to using odors to communicate. For one thing, messages sent by smell are more likely to be honest than messages sent by other means. (You might be able to do a pretty good Shakira impersonation, but you can’t hide the fact that you had a tuna sandwich for lunch and haven’t brushed your teeth since). Another advantage is that unlike other signal types, an odor signal can be left behind, kind of like those sticky-notes you leave on your food in the fridge.

How do scientists know which species use odors to communicate and what information these signals contain? This investigatory process involves a lot of reasoning.

A solitary black rhino. Photo by John and Karen Hollingsworth
at the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Wayne Linklater, Katha Mayer and Ron Swaisgood, an international team of researchers associated with Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa, University of Potsdam in Germany, and the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in California, set out to test whether black rhinoceros use odor to communicate. Although rhinos lack the specialized scent glands that many smell-communicating species have, there are many reasons to suggest that they are a likely species to communicate this way.

A photo of field assistant Brayden
Crocker with rhino dung scrape mark.
Photo by Wayne Linklater.

Black rhinos are solitary. Females often have overlapping ranges, but males’ territories only overlap at their boundaries. This means that they would rarely encounter one another and would benefit from a means to leave “sticky-notes” behind to indicate where their territories are. Furthermore, despite their poor eyesight, male black rhinos have a poop-ritual in which they scrape at the ground and spread their dung. Although female rhinos don’t spread their poo, they do spray their pee when they are ready to mate.

Between 2004 and 2006, the Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife Veterinary and Game-Capture Team captured a number of black rhinoceros from the Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife Reserves in South Africa in order to relocate them to other reserves for conservation purposes. At this time, Wayne, Katha, and Ron collected dung from rhinos with known sexes and ages. They stored the dung in labeled plastic bags and froze them to preserve the odor freshness for a series of experiments to explore the extent of the black rhinos’ abilities to communicate with their bodily waste.

In one experiment, the researchers asked whether black rhinos could differentiate between the dung of males and females and between the dung of adults and immature subadults. They presented rhinos with the dung of young males, young females, adult males and adult females, and then measured how many times they sniffed each and how long they spent sniffing. The rhinos spent more time sniffing male dung than female dung. This means that rhino poop likely communicates the sex of the pooper. Rhinos also responded differently to adult and subadult poop, suggesting that they can tell whether the pooper is an adult or not.

In order to test whether rhinos may be able to tell the individual identity of the pooper, they did a habituation-dishabituation test. Habituation is when an animal gets used to something that happens repeatedly and stops responding to it. For example, the first time you heard Gangnam Style, you probably stopped what you were doing and maybe even learned the dance. But now it has been so ridiculously over-played that when you hear it, you just ignore it. Dishabituation happens when an animal is exposed to something slightly different and has a heightened response again. Kind of like the excitement over Psy’s new song, Gentleman, even though it sucks.

A photo of rhino performing flehmen, a behavior that helps
waft odors for better odor detection. Photo by Wayne Linklater.

Wayne, Katha, and Ron exposed rhinos to the same individual’s dung three times to see if their interest in it waned. With each presentation, the rhinos spent a little less time sniffing it. When the researchers put poop from a different rhino (that was the same sex and age as the first pooper) in front of them, their interest returned. This suggests that rhinos can tell the individual identity of the pooper from his/her poop.

But can rhinos use their poop like “sticky-notes”? The researchers aged dung for 1, 4, 16 and 32 days and put them in front of rhinos to smell. Their response was the same, no matter how old the dung was. This indicates that rhinos can spread their poop to leave an “I was here” message for at least a month.

As fun as it may be to spend years studying rhinoceros poop, there are some important uses for research like this. Black rhinos are critically endangered, largely due to hunting, poaching and habitat loss. In fact, Mozambique's Limpopo National Park declared the last of their rhino population killed as recently as last month. Conservation efforts such as captive breeding programs and reintroductions have helped in several areas, but have not been enough to sustain the populations. Conservationists could apply this knowledge of how rhinoceros use dung odors to communicate to these breeding and reintroduction efforts in order to make them considerably more successful.


Want to know more? Check this out:

Linklater, W., Mayer, K., & Swaisgood, R. (2013). Chemical signals of age, sex and identity in black rhinoceros Animal Behaviour, 85 (3), 671-677 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.12.034

Miss Behavior’s Picks of 2012

The "Best in Show" for 2012:
The Top 5 Animal Physiology
and Behavior Blog Posts of 2012.
Photo from freedigitalphotos.net.

‘Tis the season for year-end lists. As we sift through lists of the most downloaded songs, most popular books, best movies, most interesting people, and most embarrassing moments of 2012, I would feel remiss if I did not contribute my own year-end list for the best animal physiology and behavior blog posts. There have been so many great blog posts across the interwebs this year, it was hard to choose. These are my picks for The Top 5 Animal Physiology and Behavior Blog Posts of 2012 (not including The Scorpion and the Frog posts, of course, and in no particular order).

1. Paternal care is rare in the animal kingdom. Males taking care of babies that aren’t even their own is exceptional. Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish talks about the strange case of a snail species in which males don’t just care for their own babies, but other snails’ babies too in Long-Suffering Snail Dads Carry Illegitimate Babies.

2. Jordan Gaines at Gaines, on Brains explains exactly what happens to your cat when you give her that catnip-filled toy in Catnip Fever: Why Your Cat Acts High.

3. Chimpanzees don’t just use tools, but they carefully select them. Jason Goldman at The Thoughtful Animal writes about how scientists discovered this chimpanzee decision-making process in For Chimps, Tool Choice Is A Weighty Matter.

4. Everything you have ever wanted to know about turtle penises (and much, much more) is brilliantly explained in Tetrapod Zoology by Darren Naish at Terrifying Sex Organs of Male Turtles.

5. In Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong explains how fairy wrens know which babies are theirs in Fairy Wrens Teach Secret Passwords to Their Unborn Chicks to Tell Them Apart From Cuckoo Impostors.

Enjoy!

Playing “Good Cop, Bad Cop” with Octopuses

Have you ever seen an octopus in an aquarium, or maybe even in the ocean, and thought, “I know you!”? No? Well, they might think that when they see you!

We’ve known for some time that many domestic animals, like dogs, can tell us people apart. It turns out that a lot of animal species can recognize individual people. But how do we humans know that? It’s not like you can walk right up to an animal and say “Hey! Remember me?” ...Well, I guess you could do that, but how would you interpret the answer?

Imagine everything that an animal would have to be capable of to be able to recognize different people: the animal would have to be able to discriminate, learn and remember. Those are pretty complex tasks. Despite our stereotypes of molluscs, octopuses (not “octopi”) are actually quite good at all of these things. They are visual animals that can differentiate between abstract shapes, remember visual patterns, and be conditioned (Conditioning is a process by which an animal learns to associate a behavior with some previously unrelated stimulus). Additionally, many people acknowledge octopuses as the most intelligent (and coolest) of all invertebrates. Furthermore, there have been several anecdotal reports of octopuses recognizing individual people. Some octopuses at aquariums consistently approach the keepers that feed them, even when the keeper is in a crowd of other people. One octopus being trained in a lever-pressing task regularly chose to squirt the researcher in the face rather than press the lever. Another octopus apparently only jetted water at a particular night guard. So octopuses seem like a pretty good species to test individual human recognition (and to test for a sense of humor, but that is for another day).

If you were an octopus, could you tell these two people apart?
Photo by Veronica von Allworden from a figure in the paper
in The Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science

Roland Anderson and Stephanie Zimsen at the Seattle Aquarium, Jennifer Mather at the University of Lethbridge, and Mathieu Monette at the University of Brussels, set out to do just that. They caught eight giant Pacific octopuses from the wild and took them to the Seattle Aquarium. For 5 days a week over two weeks, they repeated the following process: Two identically-dressed testers played the roles of “good cop” and “bad cop”. Twice a day for each animal, each of the two testers would separately open the tank so they could be seen by the octopus and record its behavior: movements, inking, blowing water, funnel direction, skin color and texture, respiration rate, and the presence or absence of an eyebar (color-changing skin around the eye that may darken due to disturbance). Then, one of them would feed the octopus, and the other would gently poke it with a bristly stick (which was not harmful, but probably pretty irritating). The “good cop” always fed the octopus and the “bad cop” always poked it, although the people that played “good cop” and “bad cop” were different for each animal. The order of the “good cop” and “bad cop” treatments was determined randomly each day. On the last day of the second week, each tester opened the tanks, looked in, and recorded the animals’ behavior.

A giant Pacific octopus displaying his eyebar (shown with the white arrow)
in the wild. Photo by Veronica von Allworden from a figure in the paper in
The Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science

In the first day or two of testing, octopuses generally moved away from both testers equally, did not have a difference in where their water jets faced or in displaying their eyebars. But in the second week, octopuses generally responded to testers that fed them by moving towards them, aiming their water jets away from them and not displaying eyebars; they generally responded to testers that poked them by displaying their eyebars, aiming their water jets at them, and moving away from them. And some of the octopuses (the larger ones) had faster breathing rates when they saw the testers that poked them than when they saw the testers that fed them.

So octopuses can recognize individual humans, and they treat people differently depending on how they have been treated by the humans. …Hmmm… If octopuses can do it, imagine what other species may be able to do it. Meditate on that the next time you interact with an animal.

Now add individual human recognition to other things we know octopuses can do, like learn and remember skills, play with toys, express personalities, and detect things by vision and smell. And they can do this:

and this:

and this:

I mean really, is there anything octopuses can’t do?

Do you want to get to know the octopuses from this study? Learn to recognize them at the Seattle Aquarium or the Seaside Aquarium, where they are now on exhibit.

Want to know more? Check these out:

1. Anderson RC, Mather JA, Monette MQ, & Zimsen SR (2010). Octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) recognize individual humans. Journal of applied animal welfare science : JAAWS, 13 (3), 261-72 PMID: 20563906

2. Mather, J.A., Anderson, R.C and Wood, J.B. (2010). Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate. Timber Press, Portland, OR.

3. Octopus Chronicles, a Scientific American blog dedicated to everything fascinating and amazing about octopuses

4. AnimalWise, a blog about animal cognition