Lots of beach - goers line up seagulls annoying , but usually the only impairment they do is snatching forth poorly - guard snacks . On one fussy beach , though , scientists have found that some sea gull have a much more aggressive and grisly way of life of make their meals .
BiologistAustin Gallagherand his team havedocumenteda startling conduct among kelp gull in Dorob National Park on the Namibian sea-coast . One of their quisling , a local guide who ’s lead kayak and 4x4 tour of the commons since 1999 , has log around 500 case where gulls have approached Cape fur seal whelp and “ attack the visual part of the seal with its schnozzle , and attempted to murder and consume the seals ’ eyeballs . ” After plucking out a seal ’s oculus , which the shuttlecock successfully did about half the fourth dimension , the first attacker was joined by other gulls who pecked at the blind and defenseless seal ’s soft belly and began consuming it .
As far as Gallagher knows , this is the first record of this attack behavior and may be unique to the gulls living in the park . Why they do it is n’t precisely clear , but the researchers recall the birds are just making the best of a bad position . Both gull and seal populations in the sphere have raise in the last few decades and the two animal compete for the same food reference : fish . With overfishing by human defecate that competition stiffer , the gulls seem to to have turned their rivals into an alternate intellectual nourishment source . Each Modern batch of pups “ represents a dense and predictable heart rate of energy ” for the gulls , the research worker publish , and plucking out their center pull in them gentle picking .
While seal getting their eyes plucked out may be knockout to stomach , the researcher say that the gulls ' odd , aggressive onset merit attention . Shifts in behavior like this can be indicator of bionomic changes to come , helping us translate how press like overfishing are disrupting natural systems and alerting conservationists to orbit and species that need shelter .
