How Does the Blue-Footed Booby Work?

This marine bird carries the color of the ocean in its webbed feet, was named after an insult, and uses its excrement in creative ways. Learn about the blue-footed booby in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/birds/blue-footed-booby.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff.
Laurin Bogel bamb here, what's brown, white and blue? And
moves like a TikTok dance challenge. The blue footed booby
a wild ocean bird that's named after an old insult
and is the subject of our episode today. And yes, friends,

(00:25):
that means I am going to be saying the word
booby a lot here, So fellow immature humans, go on
and get the giggles out, now, okay. The blue footed
booby is a medium large seabird that makes its home
in the tropical to subtropical bits of the Eastern Pacific,
from southern Mexico to Peru. They have salt and pepper heads,

(00:46):
white breasts, dark brown wings, and prominent, often bright blue
webbed feet, arranging in shades from cyan to azure. They
have long, pointed bills that sometimes also carry some blue coloration,
a sort of cigar shaped bodies, and narrow angular wings.
They stand a little over two and a half feet

(01:06):
tall about eighty centimeters, so about the size of a goose,
but shaped more like a duck with a pointy bill
and tail. And yes, they dance, specifically a male bird
will engage in a mating dance To attract a particular female.
He'll raise one foot at a time in a move
known as sky pointing, and circle around her in an

(01:29):
exaggerated strut to fit for the ministry of silly walks.
If she's impressed, she'll join the dance, and both birds
will extend their wings out to their size, raise their heads,
and call out with whistles and long, hollow sounding trumpets. However,
they are a rare seabird that's otherwise quiet most of
the time. The blue footed booby is believed to have

(01:53):
gotten its name from early Spanish explorers in the mid
fifteen hundreds, who doubted the intelligence of these and related
birds and called them pajaro bobo, meaning a bird that's
foolish or silly. English speakers transformed this to booby bird
a century later, possibly in conjunction with an existing English

(02:14):
insult of booby, meaning someone who's inept or childish. They
were referring to the way these birds move clumsily on
land and the unwitting way in which they approached humans
without fear. About half of the population of blue footed
boobies lives in the Galapka's Islands, the famously ecologically fascinating

(02:35):
chain of seventeen volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean, about
six hundred miles or one thousand kilometers west of South America.
The islands are part of their closest neighboring country, Ecuador,
which in nineteen fifty nine declared ninety seven percent of
the island's land area a national park and preserved the
surrounding waters as a marine reserve. This declaration was preceded

(02:58):
by Charles Darwin's visit to the islands in eighteen thirty five,
where the flora and fauna that developed there in extreme
isolation inspired his evolutionary theory. The other half of the
world's blue footed boobies arranges along the western coasts of north,
central and South America, with most of these coastal denizens
concentrated in Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru. The blue footed

(03:22):
boobies leave their nesting grounds at daylight to hunt their
preferred prey of small animals of the open ocean, which
takes them on flights over cold waters to fertile areas
where deep swells ascend to the surface that are rich
with things like sardines, anchovies, and squid. A. Once a
group of boobies locates as school, they'll dive down into

(03:43):
the water from great heights at high speeds. They can
hit the water going sixty miles an hour that's ninety
five kilometers an hour, and use that force to plummet
some eighty feet or twenty five meters below the surface.
On their way back up, the birds snap up their
targets in their beaks. Their skulls contain special air sacks

(04:03):
to prevent brain damage from these enormous changes in pressure.
Female birds tend to be a little bit bigger than males.
It's thought that this helps them dive deeper and scoop
larger catches, and thus build up nutrients for egg laying.
After finding a mate for the season via the aforementioned dance,
blue footed booby pears nest on land right on the

(04:26):
rocky terrain of shorelines, but they don't build elaborate nests
in preparation for eggs. Instead, after the female bird lays
one to three eggs on the rocks, both partners work
to create a nest around the eggs by doing what
comes naturally, excreting waste yep. The birds take turns protecting

(04:48):
the nest and flying out to catch dinner, with one
staying behind to keep the eggs warm and work on
their humble abode. Over time, they create a circular walled
nest a around the eggs, built with layer upon layer
of poop, but not all is always well within those walls.
Male booby's on shore of egg eternity with a new

(05:11):
female may destroy the eggs. Other booby species may maraud
the nest and break the eggs, and because the eggs
can hatch days apart from each other, older chicks may
kill their younger competition them's the breaks, but each new
generation highlights the reason that blue feet work for the booby.

(05:32):
The color comes from pigments that the birds in jest
through their fish rich diet. Any bird that's weak or
unhealthy will struggle to feed itself and therefore not gain
the brightest shade of blue for its feet. When the
male birds do that mating danced feet held high, they're
showing off their fitness to the female birds. For the

(05:54):
article this episode is based on, has to Forks spoke
with Lisa M. Webb, a licensed clinical psychologist who collected
data on blue footed boobies in the Galapagos Islands during
her master's in Environmental Health and conservation science. She said,
male blue footed boobies are evaluated by potential mates by
the blueness of their feet. This blueness is an indicator

(06:15):
of health and strength, as so a female will choose
a mate with vivid, dark blue feet as that suggests
a greater probability of healthy offspring. Their feet are so
striking partially because they're webbed, known in biology as totapalmate feet.
This means that all four toes of the foot are

(06:36):
joined by webbing that makes the bird's feet efficient flippers
in the water. A Webbed feet also help blue footed
boobies regulate their body temperature. If they become too cold,
they can balance on one leg and tuck one cold
foot into their downy white belly feathers. If they become
too hot, the blue footed booby cools off by pooping

(06:57):
on its own cerulean feet, love that their bodily waste
is so multi use. The blue footed booby is currently
listed as a species of Least Concern by the International
Union for Conservation, which watches out for signs of endangerment.
There are thought to be about ninety thousand individuals living
across their native territory. However, climate change and particularly ocean acidification,

(07:23):
are having an impact. As populations of the bird's food,
like sardines, has been going down. The blue footed booby
has been on a decline as well. Their population has dropped,
especially sharply on the Galapagos, which has researchers worried about
this delicate ecosystem in which these birds serve as predators

(07:44):
and prey and contribute nutrients back to the soil through
their poop. This is yet another reason that we should
all do what we can to help the environment, including
encouraging our elected officials to do so too. After all,
where else are we going to get dancing bluefooted birds
that make such good use of their excrement. Today's episode

(08:11):
is based on the article the bluefooted Booby Dance gets
the Girl every Time on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by
Lareel Dove. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership
with how Stuffworks dot Com, and it is produced by
Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio visit
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