Before they have the wing span to actually
permit them to fly, young guillemots (also known as murres) leap
hundreds of metres off towering cliffs and flutter down towards the sea,
guided by their fathers. Scientists have long wondered why these tiny
chicks make this remarkable leap, hoping to avoid the rocks below them,
in what seems an unlikely survival strategy for a species.
It had earlier been suggested that murre offspring headed off to sea
once the chicks reached about one-quarter of their adult size and were
large enough to defend themselves from potential predators and too large
to be fed at the colony. So that this seemingly death-defying behaviour
could be better understood as being, in some ways, a tradeoff between
the safety offered in the colony and fast growth rates at sea, where
more food is available.
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