When a sparrow flooded the coast of Georgia during high tide, a fish jumped at the chance to make a meal of a newly hatched chick, and a scientist’s video camera took an everyday look at the entire deadly encounter .
Footage showed a small fish called a mummy chog (Fundulus heteroclitus) jumps into a flooded nest and attacks a breeding hat (Ammospiza maritima), which shows that sparrows in this habitat are threatened by scientists who were previously unknown.
Corina Newsome, an ornithologist at the Hunter Lab at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, placed cameras on the birds’ nests to learn about the risks that predators pose. In this case, the predator came from an unexpected place: the water.
“A lot of questions come to my mind after seeing this,” Newsome told WordsSideKick.
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Tide salt marshes in Georgia are home to many species of birds, and sparrows are known to build their nests in places prone to flooding when the tide rises, Newsome and her co-authors reported on February 5 The Wilson Journal of Ornithology. It can be dangerous for young chicks, although they often survive small floods, according to the study.
But choosing a drier breeding ground that is higher up could allow breeding goats to be more exposed to a number of predators, Newsome said. Larger birds such as crows or grebes find the baby’s sparrows delicious, such as raccoons, swamp rats and American minks; sparrow chicks tend to be safer in nests that are closer to the ground as it provides protective cover.
Salt marshes are also inhabited by the hardy mummy chog. These fish are up to 9 inches long and tolerant of adverse conditions, such as low oxygen levels and dramatic temperature changes, and they like various small aquatic animals, including snails, mussels and other fish. wrote the researchers in the study.
A threat from below
On June 5, 2019, one of Newsome’s cameras captures unusual activities in a flooded sparrow during high tide. The nest contains two eggs and a chick that hatched earlier in the day.
“In the video, you can see the water rising incrementally into the nest, and the chick floating on top of the water,” Newsome said. Suddenly a fish dives over the edge of the nest and rests briefly next to the floating hatch – and then strikes it. The mummy chog pulled the chick under the water and ‘slapped the chick in its mouth’ until the nest drowned, according to the study.
A flooded nest is not necessarily an automatic death sentence for sparrows – if they can keep their head above water and the water drops before lowering their body temperature too much, even a newly hatched baby bird can survive an immersion.
“But if predators gain access to the nest with the water, it’s a new threat,” Newsome said. Nothing like this has been reported by scientists before, she added.
The encounter may have filled the mummichog’s stomach, but it left the researchers hungry for answers about this previously unseen danger. Newsome asked, for example: how does the threat of nesting spread between predators in the water and on earth? Do sparrows build their nests to optimize their protection against one type of predator, only to be vulnerable to others again? And are fish the only aquatic carnivores that make use of flooded nests, or do marsh turtles also nest during high tide?
“A lot of research has been done to show that the predation of the nest increases as the height of the nest from the ground increases,” Newsome explained. “But it adds a bit of complication to what predatory threats actually look like for this species.”
Originally published on Live Science.