Cigarettes help birds chase after parasites

The number of ticks and other parasitic insects in the bird's nest decreased sharply thanks to tobacco fibers.

Some birds in the city often quit smoking on their nests. For many people, this is a strange behavior, but they cannot explain why tobacco appears in the bird's nest.

Farmers sprayed nicotine pesticides to repel insects on some food crops. To see if the cigarette filter, which also contains nicotine, causes the same effect in the bird's nest, Constantino Macias Garcia, a researcher from the Mexican National Autonomous University, and colleagues install the resistors. In 55 finches, they are quite common in urban areas. Due to the heat emitted by the resistor, biting and many other parasitic insects have invaded the bird's nest. The team placed tobacco fibers from intact cigarettes or sucked to see the insect's reaction.

Sparrows in cities often spit tobacco to their nests.

The observed results show that the larger the number of cellulose fibers in cigarettes, the smaller the number of parasitic insects. Specifically, the number of parasites in the cellars containing cellulose from cigarettes has been absorbed by only 60% of those containing cellulose fibers from an intact cigarette, Newscientes reported.

'That shows that nicotine and other chemicals have repelled parasitic insects, because the chemicals in cigarettes are released only when people smoke them,' the team concluded.

But Macias Garcia said that it is likely that birds use tobacco fibers for other purposes, and repel insects is just an unexpected effect.

"Maybe they use cellulose from cigarettes to increase the temperature in the nest instead of feathers and hay," he said.