Recent findings report that wild animals can recognize individual humans. To explain how the animals distinguish humans, two hypotheses are proposed. The high cognitive abilities hypothesis implies that pre-existing high intelligence enabled animals to acquire such abilities. The pre-exposure to stimuli hypothesis suggests that frequent encounters with humans promote the acquisition of discriminatory abilities in these species. Here, we examine individual human recognition abilities in a wild Antarctic species, the brown skua (Stercorarius antarcticus), which lives away from typical human settlements and was only recently exposed to humans due to activities at Antarctic stations. We found that, as nest visits were repeated, the skua parents responded at further distances and were more likely to attack the nest intruder. Also, we demonstrated that seven out of seven breeding pairs of skuas selectively responded to a human nest intruder with aggression and ignored a neutral human who had not previously approached the nest. The results indicate that Antarctic skuas, a species that typically inhabited in human-free areas, are able to recognize individual humans who disturbed their nests. Our findings generally support the high cognitive abilities hypothesis, but this ability can be acquired during a relatively short period in the life of an individual as a result of interactions between individual birds and humans.
Two new species of feather mites from the superfamily Analgoidea are described from the grey-headed woodpecker, Picus canus, in Korea: Neopteronyssus koreanus sp. nov. (Pteronyssidae) and Proterothrix picinus sp. nov. (Proctophyllodidae: Pterodectinae). Feather mites of the genera Neopteronyssus Mironov, 2002 and Proterothrix Gaud, 1968 are described for the first time in Korea. Morphological descriptions of both new species are complemented with partial sequences of their mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene as DNA barcodes.
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