Professor Paul Graham

Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

No, it's not a specific species, but I think it's a useful term that we all recognise.

But different places, it might be a herring gull or a silver gull or a blackback gull, but they're very closely related and they all share this love of chips.

So they do show very similar behaviours.

It's a natural tendency to steal, certainly.

So these species share a trait that we call kleptoparasitism, which is the idea of getting food by stealing from others.

So if you're particularly adept at that, you can obviously save energy by spending less time foraging if you're a particularly good thief.

These gull species will do amazing behaviours where they'll kind of attack people.

other gulls or other seabirds as they're flying.

And they'll kind of hit them and make them drop their food.

And then they'll swoop underneath and catch the food that's been dropped.

And it's not a great leap to imagine how they transferred that to the slightly more slow pace of human life and people wandering around seafronts with plates of chips.

It's not natural, but it's kind of, you can see where they got it from.

Yes, that's a true nature, red in tooth and claw kind of scenario, that one, isn't it?

Oh yeah, they're very, very smart animals.

One of the characteristics of thieves is that your genetics can't tell you exactly what food you're going to get.

So you have to be born with a little bit of flexibility and you have to let your environment tell you which situations might give you the food that you can steal.

And so having that flexibility means that you have to be a rapid learner.

And so we see rapid learning in a social context between gulls.