Here’s the summer beach hack you didn’t know you needed: Placing fake googly eyes on your food packaging just might keep seagulls from snatching your snacks. At least it might help. This is according to a newly released study out of the U.K., which evaluated the effectiveness of googly eyes on gulls’ willingness to steal human food. About half of the time, researchers said the gulls wouldn’t take a package or container if it was “looking” at them.
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“Human‐wildlife conflict is on the rise due to urbanisation, and the development of non‐invasive deterrents can help to mitigate negative interactions,” the researchers wrote in the study. “[. . .] Many animals exhibit aversive behaviour to eyes and directed gaze, and we tested whether gulls foraging in urban areas were deterred by and/or habituated to artificial eye‐like stimuli (known as eyespots) in the short term.”
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The researchers discovered that some gulls were “slower to approach and less likely to peck a takeaway food box with eye‐like stimuli compared to a box without eyes.” In fact, about half of the birds tested avoided boxes with eyes completely, while about half didn’t care about the googly eyes at all. So, it could be worth a shot this summer, depending on your gulls. Researchers performed their tests with urban European herring gulls.
Watch a news report about the study here:
Read the full study here.
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