DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
Picture the scene - you're strolling along the boardwalk when suddenly, and out of nowhere, a seagull swoops in and steals your french fries or your hot dog bun. It's a summer menace many of us have experienced. But when it comes to the diet of a seagull, is there anything that turns their beaks up? That's where Gulls Eating Stuff comes in, a website where people can submit photos of whatever they find seagulls feasting on. It was created by Alice Risely, an animal ecologist at the University of Salford in the U.K., who joins us now. Thanks for being with us.
ALICE RISELY: Hi. Yeah, very happy to be here.
ELLIOTT: Let's start with having you just explain to us why you study seagulls and what they're eating.
RISELY: Yeah, sure. I really love talking about gulls. So I study gulls because I find them a sort of incredibly fascinating group of species. They're very smart. They're very adaptable. And they have changed their behavior and ecology a lot over the last sort of 30 years. So they have really adapted very well to urbanization, land use change. And they've started nesting and foraging more and more in cities and towns, not even just on the coast. They're kind of going inland as well - some of these more marine species.
And one of the things that we kind of want to know is exactly what gulls are eating. And I know this kind of seems like a bit of a dumb question because they do eat everything. But actually, this isn't very helpful if you want to make conservation decisions, for example. So we decided to try and dig into this question of diet a bit more. And, yeah, this Gulls Eating Stuff idea was created where people can submit photos of gulls eating stuff.
ELLIOTT: So Gulls Eating Stuff is a way for you to collect data and information. But I imagine it's just also kind of fun watching what the gulls steal. Do you have any favorite images so far?
RISELY: It is really fun. I have seen a lot of photos of gulls eating stuff. Nothing really surprises me anymore, but there was a photo of a gull that had just hunted a mole, which, yeah, you know, those sort of cute little mammals that live underground, and usually they pop their head up in a molehill. And a gull, I guess, had been hunting them and had sort of grabbed one. I also saw a photo of a gull that had learned to steal milk from a mother seal. So it learned how to kind of suckle on this seal, and this sort of poor baby seal was kind of, like, lolling around next to it whilst this gull stole the - its milk. And yeah, lots of photos of gulls sort of doing very comedy things in terms of stealing food from people as well.
ELLIOTT: Seagulls have been facing population declines both in the U.S. and the U.K. Do you find that diet is a factor, or there are other reasons here?
RISELY: It's a complicated issue. What we're finding in the U.K. is that a lot of the sort of more natural, traditional gulls, or I call them trad gulls, that are kind of nesting in colonies on offshore islands in remote cliffs, these are really collapsing. So actually, some of these colonies have collapsed to zero. Whilst on the other end of the spectrum, we're getting more and more gulls in towns that are doing very well and are increasing. This is actually making it quite hard to know exactly what is going on with their populations. I do think diet would be a massive thing. We actually don't know for sure. This is kind of why we're sort of starting this project, to look more into diet. But I do imagine that, yeah, a lack of resources in some of these natural landscapes is driving their declines.
ELLIOTT: That's Alice Risely, an animal ecologist at the University of Salford. Her website is Gulls Eating Stuff. Thank you.
RISELY: Thank you.
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