Duckling imprinting

[Cecil]

Am I correct in thinking that ducks imprint on the first animal they see after hatching, and follow it around unfailingly?

If so, would it be possible to arrange a set of eggs in a ring such that they all hatched at the same time, and each duck imprinted on the next one in the circle?

 

[Roboramma]

Am I correct in thinking that ducks imprint on the first animal they see after hatching, and follow it around unfailingly?

If so, would it be possible to arrange a set of eggs in a ring such that they all hatched at the same time, and each duck imprinted on the next one in the circle?

I think it's more like "the first tall skinny moving objects", which likely be their mother's legs.

Which brings up an interesting point. We all look at an animal and automatically realise that's what it is. So it seems like a simple thing to do. But from a data processing point of view, there must be some mechanism for taking what we see and saying "that's an animal". Which isn't a trivial thing to do. And I think that animals will tend to use the simplest criteria to determine what they're looking at that they can for their purposes.

A wasp might not need to know that much about something to know that it's another wasp that it can mate with. Which is why some orchids can take advantage of that.

Sorry for the digression. I just find it all very cool.

 

[AK-Dave]

Ducklings (from my own observations) will follow anything that they spend enough time with, although the longer they spend with one particular thing, the more they imprint on it. I have had them start following me even when the mother was present, but only for the first day or two after they hatch. After that, they start to realize that there is a difference between all the big things walking around. I had a duckling hatch in my hand, and even though I was the first thing it saw, it didn't seem to imprint on me any more than the others that hatched in the nest. If I stood in one place too long, it would wander away, and if it got close to someone/something else that started moving, it would start to follow that. It was pretty funny to see a 2 day old duckling franticly trying to keep up with a cat while the cat was trying to get away from this noisy fluffy thing that kept chasing it.

 

[Ducky]

This thread is hysterical to me simply because the name "foulsound" came from when I was working at a private school and the wee ones called me "Ducky" and followed me everywhere.


carry on...