Posted on Feb. 14: Blue movies for the birds

Are birds turned on by blue movies? Apparently so.

New research by McMaster University PhD student Alex Ophir shows that female quails that initially weren't interested in a particular male quail have their interest piqued by watching a short video of that quail frolic with another female.

“We found that she's spending more time with the male who she didn't initially show interest in,” said Ophir, who is in the final stages of his psychology studies. “She recognizes the bird who starred in the blue movie and now she's attracted to him.

“She can tell whether the male she sees in real life was the male she saw in the video,” said Ophir, whose research focuses on mate choice and sex behaviour. “What we've found is that watching the video will increase her preference for the copulating male. She can distinguish between the quail male Tom Cruise and the quail male Mel Gibson.”

Ophir used 30 male and 30 female 52-day-old Japanese quail in the study.

“These findings provide the first demonstration of which we are aware of birds transferring individual identification from a video sequence to a real animal,” said Ophir, whose research will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Animal Behaviour.

“We showed that they have an ability to watch the mating process on TV and transfer it to the individual that the video represented. Nobody, to our knowledge, has been able to use a video stimulus with birds in this way before.”

Ophir said possible next steps in using computers for bird research could be to make the sequences interactive, modify video images to see what is important in a complex visual stimulus, or to investigate the cognitive processes in avian species.