Urban birds have learned to use a cigarette butts to smoke out parasites (VIDEO)

funny video but they didn't even get it lit... so how is it helping with parasites? lol

thanks for the chuckle

this is not a joke, but Nature magazine did not post video

The team also used heat traps to test whether the repellent effect of the cigarette butts was related to their nicotine content, rather than to their structure or other features. Suárez-Rodríguez and her colleagues placed traps in the nests of 27 house sparrows (Passer domesticus) and 28 house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) on their university campus. The traps, which use warmth to lure parasites close, were fitted with cellulose fibres and filters from either smoked or unsmoked cigarettes, as well as adhesive tape to catch the arthropods. After 20 minutes, the team found that devices with unsmoked butts had many more parasites attached to them than devices with smoked butts — which contain more nicotine as the cigarette smoke has passed through them. Indeed, in nests that contained bird eggs, traps with unsmoked butts caught on average more than twice as many parasites.
“It really makes me wonder: might these birds show a preference for cigarette brands high in nicotine? If they did, that might suggest this behaviour has truly evolved as an adaptive response to challenges from parasites,” says Timothy Mousseau, an ecologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
As well as having anti-parasite effects, Suárez-Rodríguez cautions there may be as-yet unknown negative effects for the birds, because many compounds in cigarette butts are known carcinogens, and some are pesticides.
More: [link to www.nature.com]