Richard Prum: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do we have good theories of bird property rights, somehow invoking the ideas of relative scarcities to explain when birds are territorial or not territorial? Or is that just a big mess that we don’t understand? No, there are some good things. If you’re, say, an aerial insectivore — you’re catching insects in the air — you’ll be territorial if you catch insects that are 15 inches away from a branch. Just going out for a little sally. You could defend all those branches — that’s my territory. But if you’re a swift or a swallow, and you’re flying hundreds of meters or hundreds of feet up in the air and all of it, it’s very hard to defend that, so you give it up. Lots of marsh birds . . . Marshes are very rich — lots of bugs. If you can grab your patch of lily pads or bulrushes or cattails, you can really do well. You want to defend that. But if you’re a puddle duck, there’s going to be lots of water there, and things somewhere 18 inches below the surface of the water — you can’t really defend that. For the most part, it’ll vary with your body, your ecology, et cetera. We can do experiments. For example, sometimes hummingbirds will defend a floral resource, and then when it gets big enough, they’ll just give it up because there’s no reason to do it anymore. Now, in all of these conversations we have a segment in the middle called underrated versus overrated. I toss out a name, an idea, a place. You tell me if you think it’s underrated or overrated. Got it?…

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