Seagulls choose their meals based on what people nearby are eating

Seagulls pay close attention to our food choices and show a strong preference for items like those that people are eating nearby.

European herring gulls (Larus argentatus), a ubiquitous presence in coastal towns and cities in the UK, are notorious food snatchers – or kleptoparasites, to use the scientific term. “Many people still think that gulls are not very smart, even though kleptoparasitism to us suggested a higher level of cognition, so we wanted to explore this further,” says Franziska Feist at the University of Sussex, UK.

Feist and her colleagues studied gulls on the Brighton beachfront for a few months in 2021 and 2022. They presented blue and green packets of potato crisps to groups of gulls. An experimenter sat on the ground about 5 metres away and either idly watched the gulls or pulled out a green or blue packet from their bag and ate from it.

The researchers found that 48 per cent of the birds approached the packets when the experimenter was eating, compared with 19 per cent when they weren’t. When gulls approached and pecked a packet, they chose the same colour as the experimenter’s packet 95 per cent of the time.

The fact that their foraging choices were influenced by human behaviour shows that gulls are excellent social learners with a high level of cognition, the researchers say.

“The evolutionary history of herring gulls wouldn’t have involved humans, since their urbanisation is rather recent,” says Feist. “So the skills we identified, those that allow them to learn from another species through observations, must come from more general purpose intelligence, rather than an innate ability. This is a very exciting notion to me.”

“I think it shows very clearly that gulls are highly adaptable birds when it comes to foraging,” says Damien Farine at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Madeleine Goumas at the University of Exeter, UK, says studies like this can play a role in minimising conflicts between humans and gulls, but the birds’ use of human food cues may be problematic. “Gulls seem to have realised that we are a great information source when it comes to finding food,” she says. “However, the kind of processed food humans eat is a relatively new addition to wild animals’ diets and it is unclear whether it is actually beneficial for them, which is a concern when the species is declining.”