• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Friday, October 10, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Biology

Acorn woodpeckers wage days-long battles over vacant territories, radio tag data show

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
September 7, 2020
in Biology
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
IMAGE
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

IMAGE

Credit: Neil Losin

When acorn woodpeckers inhabiting high-quality territories die, nearby birds begin a battle royal to win the vacant spot. Researchers used radio tags to understand the immense effort woodpecker warriors expend traveling to and fighting in these dangerous battles. They also found spectator woodpeckers go to great lengths to collect social information, coming from kilometers around just to watch these chaotic power struggles. The work appears September 7 in the journal Current Biology.

“When you’re approaching a big tree with a power struggle from far away, you’ll first hear a lot of acorn woodpeckers calling very distinctly, and see birds flying around like crazy,” says first author Sahas Barve (@SahasBarve), currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “When you get closer, you can see that there are a dozen or more coalitions of three or four birds fighting and posturing on branches. One group has to beat all the others to win a spot in the territory, which is really, really rare in animals–even in fantasy novels it usually boils down to one army against the other.”

The chaos of the battles makes studying behavior using direct observation difficult. But Barve and his team had an advantage: they used new radio telemetry technology that allowed them to track the birds’ locations down to the minute. With radio tags, which “sit like a rock-climbing harness with a fanny pack on the woodpecker’s back,” the researchers could learn how much time was spent fighting at the power struggles and where the warriors came from.

Power struggles for co-breeding positions in oak trees with “granaries”–large acorn storage structures built by the birds consisting of acorns stuffed into thousands of individual holes in the bark–involve fighting coalitions formed by groups of non-breeding brothers or sisters from neighboring territories. The radio tag data showed that some birds return day after day and fight for ten hours at a time. “We didn’t think it could be that long because they have to be away from their home territory,” says Barve. “When do they eat? We still don’t know.”

The researchers hypothesized that woodpeckers would fight the hardest for territories closest to their current home, but found that deciding to fight may depend on more complex social cues as they recruit members to join their coalition. “These birds often wait for years, and when there’s the right time and they have the right coalition size, they’ll go and give it their all to win a really good territory,” he says.

The woodpeckers’ complex social behavior also extends to the other group that comes to power struggles: the spectators. “We never really paid attention to them because we were always fixated on the birds that were actually fighting,” Barve says. “We often forget that there are birds sitting on trees watching nearby.” His team found that the biggest battles can attract more than 30 birds, or a third of all woodpeckers in the area, with some traveling more than three kilometers to “come with popcorn and watch the fight for the biggest mansion in the neighborhood.”

The radio tag data also showed that the spectators spend up to an hour a day watching the fights, despite many already having breeding position granaries of their own. For them, the benefits of social information must outweigh the costs of leaving their home territory unattended for considerable amounts of time. Acorn woodpeckers have tight social networks and know everyone’s place due to frequent travels to other territories. “If anything is disruptive to that, or if anything weird happens, they want to go check it out,” he says. “The spectators are probably as interested in the outcome as the fighter is, although the warriors benefit more directly.”

There’s still a lot researchers don’t know about the acorn woodpeckers’ complex social structures, but radio telemetry provides a glimpse into their unique social behaviors. “They potentially have friendships, and they probably have enemies,” Barve says. “With our radio tag data, we can tell when two birds are at the same place at the same time. The next step is to try and understand how their social networks are shaped, and how they vary across the year.”

###

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Current Biology, Barve et al.: “Woodpecker wars: tracking warriors and spectators with telemetry” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31098-8

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact [email protected].

Media Contact
Sarah Vican
[email protected]

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.073

Tags: BiologyEcology/EnvironmentZoology/Veterinary Science
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

ACMG Launches Newborn Screening Coalition to Drive Evidence-Based Advances in National Newborn Screening

ACMG Launches Newborn Screening Coalition to Drive Evidence-Based Advances in National Newborn Screening

October 10, 2025
Chloroplast lncRNA Drives Leaf Ageing Function Change

Chloroplast lncRNA Drives Leaf Ageing Function Change

October 10, 2025

Human Gut Bacteria Make Contrasting Immune Glycolipids

October 10, 2025

Hippos Roamed Europe During the Last Ice Age, New Research Reveals

October 10, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • Sperm MicroRNAs: Crucial Mediators of Paternal Exercise Capacity Transmission

    1196 shares
    Share 478 Tweet 299
  • New Study Reveals the Science Behind Exercise and Weight Loss

    102 shares
    Share 41 Tweet 26
  • New Study Indicates Children’s Risk of Long COVID Could Double Following a Second Infection – The Lancet Infectious Diseases

    96 shares
    Share 38 Tweet 24
  • Revolutionizing Optimization: Deep Learning for Complex Systems

    83 shares
    Share 33 Tweet 21

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

EVG7 Antibiotic Stops C. difficile, Spares Gut Bacteria

Revolutionizing Blood Cancer Treatment: Reprogramming Cancer Cell Death to Activate the Immune System

LED Light Targets and Destroys Cancer Cells While Protecting Healthy Tissue

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 63 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.