Washington (AFP)

Helping one's neighbor is a precept also applied by a famous species of parrots, the jaco parrot, already known for its intelligence and volubility.

Researchers have shown that the jaco parrot readily helps its congeners without expecting anything in return, a study published by the journal Current Biology Thursday and which adds a stone to our understanding of the evolution of cooperation in animals.

It was known for decades that parrots and crows were extraordinarily good at solving complex problems, to the point that they were sometimes called feathered monkeys.

So Alex, jaco parrot of Harvard who died in 2007 after a good career, during which he had acquired a vocabulary of more than 100 words, could recognize colors and quantify objects up to six.

But scientists have never managed to get another crow to help a crow.

Researchers Auguste von Bayern, from the Max Planck Institute for Birdwatching in Starnberg, Germany, and Desiree Brucks, from ETH Zurich University, designed an experiment to verify whether the same was true for parrots.

Their experience took place at the Spanish research station of Loro Parque. They placed pairs of jacos parrots in terraced boxes connected by a hole. Each box also had a window facing the researchers, which could be closed if necessary.

Parrots quickly learned that they could receive a treat if they passed a human token through the window.

But when the window of one of the two parrots was closed, this parrot voluntarily passed its own unusable tokens to its neighbor through the hole connecting them, so that this neighbor himself obtains more treats.

Seven of the eight parrots tested acted with such apparent generosity.

Other configurations made it possible to demonstrate that the activity of passing tokens from one parrot to another was not considered to be a game. Parrots only pass the token to their neighbor if this could help him to get treats.

Like humans, parrots seemed to favor their friends, rather than just acquaintances. Friends received more chips.

Why this "prosocial" behavior, which other birds (macaws of Coulon), in the same experiment, did not reproduce?

Perhaps it is related to the fact that the parrot jacos live in very large groups, going up to 1.2000 individuals, says Desiree Brucks with AFP.

There are 393 species of parrots recorded worldwide, and the team would like to study which ones cooperate and how, in order to try to understand what evolutionary pressures have been at work.

© 2020 AFP