New scientific research indicates that this “love hormone” helps birds more liberal with their own species.
Oxytocin is known to scientists as the romantic “love hormone”. Essentially, it is a chemical found in the human brain that regulates complex behaviors such as empathy, pleasure, and attachment in relationships.
Although oxytocin is involved in complex behaviors, it appears only to humans.
But surprisingly, this hormone is also found in other animals.
“In mammals, we call this hormone oxytocin. In birds, we call it mesotocin,” said Dr. Juan Duque, a neuroscientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. in fact, it is still the chemical oxytocin found in birds.
Dr Duque and his colleagues examined a bird named Pinyon Jay, a bird related to crows, to determine two issues: The first is how oxytocin affects them. The second is whether the role of the hormone is the same as in humans.
They designed experiments in which the Pinyon Jay bird had a choice: to eat the worms alone or to share them with the neighbor in the cage next door.
This experiment was supposed to confirm the theory of the biological world that Pinyon Jay was one of the birds that made it a rule to share food with his fellows.
Indeed, these experiences all confirm that the Pinyon Jay bird is ready to feed its friends with food. Next, the researchers conducted experiments to see how generous Jay birds were in the process of sharing their food with their fellows.
They injected a certain amount of the hormone oxytocin into the noses of the birds and observed a change in their interactions with each other.
The increase in mesotocin, they found, made the birds more generous, more willing to share food with their neighbors. The results of these experiments are all published in the journal Biology Letters.
In animals, these other beneficial sharing actions like these are often referred to as “social behavior”.
Like oxytocin in mammals, mesotocin plays an important role in the social behavior of birds, says Dr. Duque.
They share food with each other or engage in “other social behaviors” in order to maintain and establish relationships with other birds. Thus, the Pinyon Jay bird can use different social behaviors to bind, create an interaction, happiness between them ”.
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