Wow...Swans and Koi! Swans are perfectly capable of eating dry food, and if they were eating the food they held down to the water, youd see them raise their heads to swallow it. Further, swans are quite aggressive, so if they didnt like the fish stealing the food from them, they would let them know about it in no uncertain terms (theyre quite capable of injuring those koi). So, they are under no obligation to continue to hand down the food to the fish, and if they really wanted to eat it, they could do so without dipping it. For whatever reason, they are choosing to pass the food down (and do so repeatedly), and yes, this does qualify as altruism (as scholars define it, in animals), because the fish can not in any way be construed as offspring, or even familial genetic relatives, of the swans. Upon repeated viewing, concentrating on the behavior of the fish and specificity with which the swan on the right of the image seems to give food directly to them, I wonder if in fact the fishs begging behavior doesnt seem rather like a baby birds begging to them, which would mean that the swans are in a sense treating the fish the way many people treat their pets, as surrogate children. Nathaniel Owle
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 13:24:34 +0000