Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
For the first time, scientists have observed a non-primate animal using flavourings to enhance the experience of eating food.
The behaviour was spotted in Goffin’s cockatoos which dunked potatoes or noodles into a bowl of blueberry-flavoured soy yoghurt.
It appears the motivation for the behaviour was flavour.
The observations, presented in a paper published in the journal Current Biology, ruled out that the cockatoos were dunking their food for other reasons such as soaking or cleaning.
Goffin’s cockatoo, also known as the Tanimbar corella (Cacatua goffiniana), is a species of parrot endemic to Indonesia’s Tanimbar Islands, 600km north of Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory.
The corellas are the smallest white cockatoo in the world, growing to 250–300g and 31cm from head to tail.
It was formally recognised as a separate species in 2004, having previously been confused with Ducorps’ or Solomons cockatoo (Cacatua ducorpsii).
The species is near threatened according to the IUCN Red List. Its population is estimated to be 100,000–500,000, though this is declining.
The new yoghurt-based study was spurred by an unusual sight.
“In November 2022, two cockatoos (Irene and Renki) were incidentally seen dunking cooked potato pieces into blueberry-flavoured soy yogurt during breakfast at the Goffin lab in Austria,” the authors write.
Biologists from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria, observed 18 cockatoos over 14 breakfast sessions, each lasting 30 minutes. The birds were given potatoes and noodles, as well as 3 different dunking mediums: fresh water, plain soy yoghurt and blueberry-flavoured soy yoghurt.
Half of the birds dunked their food. They also preferred noodles twice as much as potato.
The birds dunked in blueberry yoghurt more than twice as often as in plain yoghurt. No food was dunked in water. The birds also preferred eating the blueberry yoghurt directly, over the plain yoghurt.
The behaviour is not consistent with dunking to soak, clean or transport the food. Cockatoos left the food in the yoghurt for an average of just 3.2 seconds. Water-soaking behaviour involves dunking food for an average of 22.9 seconds.
Differently coloured yoghurts saw no significant change in the behaviour, suggesting flavour and not visual cues governed the dunking.
The researchers report that food-flavouring behaviour outside humans is “something thus far only observationally reported in Japanese macaques”.
They’re not sure why the cockatoos have exhibited this behaviour, which they write adds to current “understanding of the emergence of rare forms of food preparation behaviours in animals”.
