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Nicotine, the highly addictive chemical compound in cigarettes, is having a bit of a resurgence as of late — with patches of the stuff even appearing in vending machines at tech company offices, offering overworked staffers a way to get through the day.
Even some species of birds are getting hooked on cigarettes — but not for the reason you might think. Instead of suffering from a debilitating nicotine addiction, blue tits across Europe are hoarding cigarette butts to ward off parasites using the natural and artificial toxins in tobacco and cigarette butts, as the New York Times reports. It’s a bizarre evolutionary outcome resulting from an otherwise ecologically damaging side effect of our collective smoking addiction.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Animal Behavior, a team of researchers at the University of Lodz in Poland suggests that volatile compounds from the cigarette remains being brought into Eurasian blue tit nests could be helping them to “avoid parasites and their effects.”
In a series of experiments, the researchers “tested whether the inclusion of cigarette butts in nests, or replacing a natural nest with a sterilized, artificial, moss and cotton wool nest on the fifth and tenth day of the nestling period,” affects the birds’ physiological health when compared to a control group.
Fascinatingly, both the inclusion of cigarette butts and the provision of sterilized nesting materials resulted in broods that “had significantly elevated hemoglobin and [red blood cell concentration], indicating improved physiological condition compared to the control group.”
Parasites, including ticks, mites, and fleas, were more common in more natural control nests that didn’t include foreign material.
Besides bringing in intact cigarette butts, Autonomous National University of Mexico ecologist Constantino Macías García told the NYT that he and his colleagues had observed finches and sparrows in Mexico City “dismember the cigarette.” The fibers inside, he suggested, may protect chicks from parasites.
Cigarette ingredients may also be capable of warding off invasive vampire flies in Darwin’s finches’ nests in the Galápagos, research has shown.
It’s a fascinating trend, with scientists finding in a 2017 study that house finch females responded to researchers placing more live ticks in their nests by placing even more cigarette butts, indicating it’s an established reaction to a heightened risk of parasitic infection among some birds.
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