Why Some Birds Flock Together

Research shows family can help during the hard times.

ByABC News
January 8, 2009, 1:18 AM

Aug. 22, 2007 — -- Scientific research is rarely easy, but Dustin Rubenstein may have raised the bar considerably during the years he spent in Africa trying to answer a basic biological question. At one point he was chased by rhinos, and one night he watched a huge cat make a kill just 25 feet from his tent, but he still managed to come up with the answer.

Rubenstein wanted to know why some species help each other raise their young while other species that are closely related go it alone. Why, for example, does the "superb starling" maintain complex social relationships with its relatives, letting them help with all the nesting chores, while other starlings seem virtually antisocial?

For decades other scientists have asked the same question, not only about birds, but all sorts of animals that choose "cooperative breeding" over the familiar mom-and-pop lifestyle. Some have suggested that it might have something to do with where they live, or their immediate environment, but that wouldn't explain why some similar species that share the same environment choose such different courses.

Rubenstein's research, published in the Aug. 21 issue of the journal Current Biology, strongly suggests that the answer does indeed lie in the environment, or more specifically, the predictability of seasonal weather patterns. He has collected DNA samples of starlings around the world, and he has studied rainfall patterns across Africa covering nearly 150 years, and all of it points to one conclusion. If you can't count on the rain coming when it's supposed to, thus producing the food you will need for yourself and your young, you're going to need a lot of help from other members of your family.

Rubenstein is an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, but the research was carried out while he was working on his doctorate at Cornell. His partner on the multiyear project was Irby Lovette, director of Cornell's Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program.

There are 117 species of starlings around the world, but there are 45 species in Africa alone.