Cody Williams

They are notoriously territorial and monogamous.

There was a group of scientists that went out to study nesting behavior of these guys.

And what they ended up finding was this queer relationship where there was three birds to a nest.

And what the researchers wanted to do is they wanted to see what is the benefit of having three birds to a nest versus two.

So they did that.

They looked at the thruple.

Basically what they found is that having the helper essentially reduced the need for the female within the thruple to do

half of this work, so it's about a 50% reduction in time she has to go and get food or feed the eagle or get some nest material.

This type of dynamic has also been observed in about 220 different species of birds and it's thought that a sex skewed populations can encourage birds to do this.

But that might not be true because these researchers were here for three consecutive years

And for those three years, these three birds grappled up.

So it's obviously their choice, and I accept that.

Now we have some colonial nesting behaviors in fish, the bluegill sunfish.

All the males basically nest together.

They build the nest.

They have this colony of males that the female then has to try and get in there, lay her eggs, and then he'll chase her away.

So he's just living with a bunch of men.

There's also different types of males.

We have...

Smaller males here, they are essentially parasites of other males.