Seagulls can be such asshole . While it ’s likely never right to apply our human sense of morality to nature , you may substantiate that seagulls were built to irritate if you ’ve ever eaten food along a beach . However , a recent studysuggests that seagulls have move on from their reign of annoyance over humans consume by the seaboard to whales .
scientist have discovered thatkelp gullsare attackingsouthern right-hand whalesin Península Valdés , Argentina , when they follow up to take a breather , pick at them and eating their blubber while they ’re still alive . The results , published in the journalPLOS ONE , intimate that these seagull attacks have risen dramatically over the last 40 year , forecast the proportion of mother and calf showing marks of sea gull attacks has increased from two percent in the 1970s to 99 percentage in 2011 .
biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City used aery picture taking , gather up from 1974 to 2001 , to look for the presence of soft touch attack lesion on 2,680 living whale ( 1,527 mothers and 1,153 calf ) off the sea-coast of Patagonia . In 1974 , around 2 percentage of these whale had lesion cause by the birds . Throughout the ' 80s this rose to 36 per centum , and by the 2000s it was 99 percent .
In the publication , the authors wrote , “ During an attack , a sucker land on a hulk ’s back and force out out skin , either opening a raw lesion or dilate a pre - existing one . During successive attacks , gulls widen and/or labour more deeply into the epidermal and subdermal stratum of skin , uncover avoirdupois and creating lesions of various size and deepness . Kelp - Gull attacks usually come about when whale are resting or surfacing to breathe and their backbone are fully or partially exhibit to the air . ”
The lesions due to gulls could head to many trouble for the whales . Healing the wound , as well fleeing from the gulls , requires energy . The subject field also stated that hulk that had been attack seem to spend less time nursing , resting , and playing compared to the mother - offspring pairs that had been left in public security .
The sketch also hoped to find out if ocean gull harassment might have increased death rates of calf in Península Valdés . From 1993 to 2002 , there was an average of 8.2 calf deaths per yr . Since then the rate has risen and uprise , with an average of 50 deaths each year between 2003 to 2014 .
The study could n’t draw any clear conclusions on the office of the birds , though , as just 56 per centum of the calves found dead had lesion from gull attacks .
No one really realise this behavior from these seabirds . However , other study have also detect progressively aggressive behaviour from kelp fall guy . A few month ago , a field reported the never - before - see behavior of kelp gullsattacking baby seal and eating their center .
Main trope acknowledgment : Amy McAndrews / Flickr.(CC BY - NC - ND 2.0 )
