Body Mods

Every now and again I see a feature on a creature and it makes me think about human gullibility.

A few weeks ago, I was crossing a bit of the Bass Strait when I encountered Pacific Gull Larus pacificus for the first time. It has a number of helpful features to get you to a confident identification, but the clincher is a bill out of all proportion to its feasible function.

Pacific Gull - Bass Strait © Jeff Clarke

The bill looks remarkably like a pair of lobster crackers. Cue a scavenge of the literature to see if anybody had researched the reason for this outsize pair of mandibles. Well, I now live in Yorkshire, where I am striving to be accepted and assimilate, so anything that looked vaguely adjacent to my thought track, but resided behind a ‘paywall’, was automatically off limits, usually accompanied by the phrase “how much?”.

I did find an interesting bit of research ‘The diet of Pacific gulls (Larus pacificus) breeding at Seal Island in northern Bass Strait’ by Tamara N. Leitch, Peter Dann and John P. Y. Arnould.

The take-away is Pacific Gulls have a disconcerting addiction to diving-petrels with a side dish of semaphore crab. I can’t imagine that a Kelp Gull, or a Great Black-backed Gull wouldn’t be able to make short work of either of those with their powerful, but relatively normal, bills.

So, if diet isn’t the driving mechanism to evolve such a whopper, what is it? Perhaps it’s a sexual selection/fitness driven evolutionary process, after all the peacock’s tail has no other function than to drive the lady peafowls wild.

Pacific Gull - Hobart © Jeff Clarke

A significant proportion of young female humans in the western world would be envious of the pout of a Pacific Gull. Perhaps Pacific Gulls are just ‘on-trend’ bellweathers and have had filler. I mean they even looks like they might be wearing lipstick. They probably have an ‘insta’ account and as I type, they are creating content to influence a generation on TikTok. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is just ‘alternative’ facts!