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The Behavioral Sciences of the California Condor

CSEF · 2018 Zoology

Nina K. Hubrich, Elsie M. Sorenson · International School of Monterey, Seaside, Monterey County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of this project is to discover more about the California Condor social behavior and hierarchy. We want to know who is the most dominant and why, and how their dominance hierarchy affects the other Condors. If there is an alpha Condor who controls the feeding group, they will influence the rest of the Condors as they feed. The alpha will typically be an older male, because the alpha male decides to be more dominant and protective over the food. Also, the wild Condors are most likely to be more aggressive. Methods/Materials The constant of the project was to observe feeding behavior on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. The control was the online Condor Camera which is is accessible to anyone and shows Condors in their natural habitat as they eat. It is accessible on a website called ventanaws.org, and the actual camera is located in Big Sur. Big Sur was where the collection of the data happened. The independent variable in the experiment were the interactions, where a Condor is dominant over another. The dependent variable was the Dominant Condor gender, age, and if they were raised captive or wild. The way the responding variables were recorded was from observing the Condor social behavior through the same public Condor Camera mentioned before. Results The results of this experiment were that the gender of the California Condor does not affect dominance. The result for the age, was that adults normally portray dominant behaviors over other adults, rather than young or elderly Condors. The results also showed that the captive raised Condor are shown to be more dominant than the wild raised Condors. Conclusions/Discussion The results show that the hypothesis is wrong. If this experiment would be repeated again, the focus would be on both who was the submissive Condor, and the more dominant one, instead of only focusing on which Condor is more dominant.

Summary statement

The project is about which California Condors are dominant based on their recorded behaviors and findings that gender and age do not matter and captive raised Condors are shown to be more aggressive toward wild raised Condors.

Help received

Some help received was from our Science teacher Alex Hofsteen, who guided us through the project, our professional contact Kelly Sorenson provided us with help and information, lastly we were provided help from our parents to grammar check our work and pay for supplies.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2018 Zoology · Entry J2306

Resources

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