Academic literature on the topic 'Lorikeet'

Lorikeets, which eat mainly nectar and pollen, show a suite of adaptations to this diet not found in granivorous and frugivorous parrots. Lorikeet gizzards are much less muscular, and their intestines shorter, than those of other parrots of the equivalent size. In lorikeets, but not other parrots, the proventricular and pyloric openings of the gizzard lie in the same plane, potentially allowing a rapid transit of both pollen (which is mostly digested in the intestine) and of nectar. Lorikeet tongues differ from other parrot tongues in that they are longer and narrower, with a rougher dorsal surface and a papillate tip. These features may enable lorikeets to harvest more efficiently the pollen so essential to their balanced nutrition.

SummaryKuhl's Lorikeet Vini kuhlii has a precarious status reflected by its disjunct distribution in the Pacific, with surviving populations in the Northern Line (Kiribati) and Austral Islands (French Polynesia) some 3,000 km apart, possibly as a result of Polynesian trade in red feathers. The species is extinct in the southern Cook Islands. On Rimatara (Austral Islands), where it is believed indigenous, it is still common but the recent introduction of the Rattus norvegicus is of concern. In the Northern Line Islands, R. rattus appears to have all but extirpated the lorikeet on Tabuaeran (Fanning Island), but one small population has apparently survived for over 70 years, an explanation for which may guide in situ conservation of Vini lorikeets on ship-rat-infested islands elsewhere. The arid and unpredictable climate of Kiritimati (Christmas Island) may preclude the establishment of lorikeets. Only on Teraina (Washington Island), where over 1,000 V. kuhlii survive, are there no confirmed threats and good in situ conservation potential.

Pelicans are generally piscivores, but occasionally prey on smaller waterbirds and other animals. I observed an Australian Pelican Pelecanus conspicillatus capture a Rainbow Lorikeet Trichoglossus moluccanus after both species had been attracted to people scattering seed for birds. The Pelican briefly caught the Lorikeet by the tail, but the Lorikeet escaped and flew away. To my knowledge, this is the first report of any pelican species capturing a parrot. It is unclear whether the Pelican was attempting to eat the Lorikeet.

About one-third of all banksia pollen grains excreted 1-2 hours after ingestion by captive New Holland honeyeaters (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), zebra finches (Poephila guttata) and budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), had lost their protoplasmic contents. Most pollen passed through the digestive systems of these birds in 4-5 hours and up to 44% of grains were digested. The faeces of wild purple- crowned lorikeets (Glossopsitta porphyrocephala) showed a similar proportion of empty grains. In the budgerigar, honeyeater and lorikeet, loss of contents of pollen grains occurred, not in the stomach, but progressively along the intestine.

Besides the primary diet of nectar, pollen, and fruits, the flower-visiting Musk Lorikeet Glossopsitta concinna feeds on lerps. However, a description of its behaviour while foraging on this latter source seems to be lacking. We describe and illustrate the feeding behaviour of the Musk Lorikeet on Spondylaspidinae psylloid lerps. The lerps were within young deformed eucalypt leaves, and the Lorikeet had to open a deformed leaf and remove the starchy lerps to feed on them. The Lorikeet took c. 1 minute to process each leaf, which suggests that these lerps are an important or satisfying food.

The Aquarium of the Pacific is a 501(c)3 institution in the United States, beholden to ticket sales for its survival. In this article I show how its staff, and its animals, co-participate in an "edutainment" project, where the institution governs the bodies of Lorikeets through regulatory technologies crafted to ensure guests have a satisfying experience and become more conservation-minded. In this way, the Lorikeets are politically deployed to support the fiscal survivability of the institution, and in its conservation education project that imagines visitors as "advanced liberal" consumers, insofar as they choose their edutainment experiences and their environmentally responsible behaviors. The resulting guest-Lorikeet interactions promote sanitized encounters with wildness, limiting the development of empathic human-animal relationships. Staff, however, do develop empathic and intersubjective relationships with the birds.Keywords: biopolitics, biopower, green governmentality, human-animal relationships, person-based identification, egomorphism, Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus)

SummaryFossils and other evidence from the Southern Cook Islands show that the Rimatara Lorikeet Vini kuhlii, known as the Kura, was widespread in the group during prehistoric times and, it was probably extirpated due to exploitation for its red feathers. Today, it survives only on Rimatara in the Austral Islands, where it is known as the ‘Ura. On Rimatara during 5-11 August 1992 we saw/heard 263 ‘Ura, and estimated the total population at 900 birds. The mixed horticultural belt, about 32% of the island, was the most favoured habitat at 2.2 birds ha1 and it supported about 61% of the total population. The species was uncommon in the coastal coconut plantations and central hills, and rare in the makatea/feo. Rats, especially Rattus rattus, have often been associated with the loss of forest birds on oceanic islands and R. rattus is thought to be responsible for the decline in other lorikeets of French Polynesia. A preliminary trapping study located R. norvegicus and R. exulans, but not R. rattus. The highest conservation priority should be given to confirming the absence of R. rattus on Rimatara and the implementation of a major quarantine programme to ensure that it is not accidentally introduced. We recommend reintroducing the lorikeet to islands within its former natural range.

The natural diet of rainbow lorikeets is low in protein but in captivity their diets contain relatively high concentrations of protein. A nitrogen (N) balance study was carried out to determine the protein requirements of lorikeets for maintenance. Five lorikeets were fed each of three diets, containing 3, 7 or 11 g egg white protein (100 g powdered diet)–1 (‘as is’ basis). After 10 days on a diet, lorikeets were placed in metabolism cages and N intakes and N excretion determined over three days. From the regression of N excretion on N intake (y = 0.8664x+ 0.032) endogenous nitrogen loss (ENL) was calculated as 32 mg N (kg body mass)–0.75 day–1 and the maintenance N requirement as 240 mg N kg–0.75 day–1. The ENL is lower than that of other nectarivores but maintenance requirement is greater, indicating an unusually low digestibility for egg white protein (13.3%). Using a conservatively low digestibility of 4.5% for pollen, it can be calculated that 5–6 g pollen (dry matter) per day would provide the 8 mg N day–1 required by a 150-g lorikeet to replace ENL. By eating 150–200 mL nectar, about 30% of requirement could be obtained.

Bird pollination is particularly common and widespread in the southern regions of Australia. Despite some eucalypts being heavily frequented by birds, they are usually considered to have a generalist pollination system because of their apparently unspecialised floral morphology. A few species possess protandrous anthers that dehisce within a tightly furled dome of filaments. We hypothesised that this facilitates pollen transport via the brush tongues of lorikeets. Using Eucalyptus leucoxylon F.Muell. and five captive rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus hematodus) as a model, we demonstrated that lorikeets remove significant quantities of pollen from flowers with inflexed filaments in a short time (30 min), compared with bagged control flowers (Mann–Whitney U test, Z = 165.4, d.f. = 29, P = 0.008). Some of this pollen is deposited on stigmas by the tongue, which is the organ that most regularly and reliably contacts stigmas. The mean number of pollen grains deposited on stigmas by each bird was as high as 121.2. Adhesive tape contacted by the tongue during foraging removed up to 2104 pollen grains, which was significantly greater than for uncontacted control tape (Mann–Whitney U test, Z = 110, d.f. = 21, P < 0.001). Scanning electron micrograph imaging of a lorikeet tongue showed many pollen grains that had been transferred onto its keratin papillae, which is likely to have contributed to high carryover rates by retaining pollen for a substantial amount of time. Minimal pollen is available for generalist pollination once the filaments unfurl. It appears highly unlikely that insects are able to access pollen from these male-phase flowers and inflexed filaments may therefore fulfil an exclusionary role.

Abstract 1. The formation of large communal roosts is a conspicuous phenomenon associated with a wide range of bird species successfully exploiting urban environments. In many Australian cities, the abundance of the Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus), a native parrot, has increased markedly in recent decades, with the species roosting in very large numbers within suburban sites. These roosting locations are noisy and cause significant fouling of the land beneath, resulting in conflict with humans. 2. We investigated the selection of roosting sites in this species in Brisbane, Australia, by comparing characteristics of both the general sites of these roosts as well as individual trees used within roosting sites and trees that were avoided. 3. Lorikeets used a wide variety of tree types for roosting but demonstrated a clear preference for clumped trees within sparsely treed areas that received significantly more artificial light at night than otherwise suitable sites and trees nearby. 4. These features of roosting sites may enhance the detection of nocturnal predators by Rainbow Lorikeets, suggesting a potential positive impact of anthropogenic lighting. Our findings provide valuable insights into the management of roost-related conflicts in urban areas. We encourage further investigations into the possible benefits of artificial light.

Previous studies have suggested that participation in psychosocial support groups such as the Foundation House (Clubhouse) model have psychological benefits for patients with major mental disorders. In this research, 47 members of the Lorikeet Clubhouse in Shenton Park, WA completed the Brief Symptom Inventory, the Level of Expressed Emotion Scale and the Coping Scale for Adults to investigate whether differences existed between active and inactive Clubhouse members. Analyses of variance found no group differences on these measures, although trends in the data suggest that Clubhouse participation have a protective effect for members who report high levels of expressed emotion (EE) in their home. These conclusions are tentative due to the small sample size. Members perceived the Clubhouse to have lower levels of EE than their home environments, however these measures were correlated.

Urbanisation typically results in homogenisation of the constituent avifauna, as generalists that are able to adapt to and persist within the urban landscape replace specialist species whose specific habitat needs are removed. Recently, within some major urban centres, parrots have become a conspicuous component of the avifauna, present in higher abundance in the urban landscape than in the natural environment. This thesis examines the composition and distribution of the parrot community within a large urban centre and evaluates the relative importance of key abiotic and biotic factors that may explain the increase in abundance of urban parrots. I demonstrated that parrot species were present in higher abundance within the urban landscape, compared to natural habitat and that, historically, both drought and wild fire resulted in an influx of some parrot species into the urban landscape. I demonstrated that the standing crop of nectar was consistently higher within streetscapes compared to the non-urban habitat and is capable of sustaining large populations of large-bodied nectarivores. I also demonstrated that trees within the urban landscape produce more flowers and flower for longer than the same species of tree outside the urban landscape. I showed that there were significantly more visitations to hollows by parrots within the urban landscape, compared to forest, as well as significantly more aggressive interactions. My results demonstrate that the urban landscape is capable of sustaining a diverse community of native parrots, particularly nectarivores such as the rainbow lorikeet. The urban landscape provides food resources in excess of that found in natural habitat, however nesting resources are fewer compared to natural habitat. My research suggest that there may be a shortage of tree hollows and I discuss how, if the density of parrots continues to increase, there may be a simplification in the current avifauna due to a shortage of breeding resources.

Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library.
Internet Protocol multicast has been standardised since the late 1980's, but is yet to be extensively deployed by most Internet Service Providers. Many organisations are not willing to bear the additional router CPU load and memory requirements that multicast entails, and the IP multicast suite of protocols requires deployment on every router spanned by the multicast group to operate. Additionally, these protocols are predominantly designed for the general case of multiple-source, multiple-receiver transmission and can be complex and inefficient to use in simpler scenarios. Single-source streaming of multimedia on the Internet is rapidly becoming a very popular application, and is predominantly being served by content providers using simultaneous unicast streams. A multicast transmission protocol designed for this application that can operate without requiring a widely deployed IP multicast infrastructure has the potential to save content-providers and network service providers significant amounts of bandwidth. This protocol should provide packet duplication and forwarding capabilities on routers in the network, rather than pushing this functionality to the receivers themselves, requiring them to become part of the multicast infrastructure. We describe Lorikeet, a new protocol for the multicast distribution of multimedia streams from a single source. This protocol builds its multicast tree from the source, discovering routers that support the protocol in the network and using them to provide branching in the tree. The tree itself is managed in a decentralised fashion, with joining receivers finding parent routers through a limited, recursive search of the tree. On a participating node, information about the tree's structure is limited to the addresses of that node's children and its path through the tree back to the source. Unlike most other multicast protocols, a new receiver is connected to the tree using its forward path from the source and packets are delivered through the tree via hop-by-hop delivery over unicast connections between nodes. Lorikeet also actively maintains the tree structure using a localised rearrangement algorithm triggered by a topological change in the tree structure. This rearrangement allows the tree to remain efficient in the face of changes to the receiver population, which can change the shape of the tree over time. Lorikeet is designed to operate with no further protocol support than that provided by existing Internet unicast protocols. It requires none of the standard IP multicast infrastructure, such as Class D group addressing. Its use of unicast connections between nodes allows it to be deployed incrementa.lly on the network, and its behaviour will degrade to simultaneous unicast when no routers that support the protocol are present at all. However, significant performance gains can be achieved even when there are only a few supporting routers present in the network: Lorikeet produces trees with half the cost of a unicast tree when just 10% of routers are Lorikeet-capable. Lorikeet's tree construction and rearrangement algorithms generate multicast trees of comparable total cost to those created by algorithms of considerably higher message complexity, such as those that employ exhaustive searches of the tree during joins. We develop the Lorikeet protocol from a set of requirements based on its target application and the properties of the current Internet. After describing the protocol's behaviour, we analyse its message complexity and its performance in terms of tree cost. We also analyse several other multicast protocols from the research literature, comparing their performance to that of Lorikeet in both complete deployment and incremental deployment scenarios.
http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1283785
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2007

Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library.
Internet Protocol multicast has been standardised since the late 1980's, but is yet to be extensively deployed by most Internet Service Providers. Many organisations are not willing to bear the additional router CPU load and memory requirements that multicast entails, and the IP multicast suite of protocols requires deployment on every router spanned by the multicast group to operate. Additionally, these protocols are predominantly designed for the general case of multiple-source, multiple-receiver transmission and can be complex and inefficient to use in simpler scenarios. Single-source streaming of multimedia on the Internet is rapidly becoming a very popular application, and is predominantly being served by content providers using simultaneous unicast streams. A multicast transmission protocol designed for this application that can operate without requiring a widely deployed IP multicast infrastructure has the potential to save content-providers and network service providers significant amounts of bandwidth. This protocol should provide packet duplication and forwarding capabilities on routers in the network, rather than pushing this functionality to the receivers themselves, requiring them to become part of the multicast infrastructure. We describe Lorikeet, a new protocol for the multicast distribution of multimedia streams from a single source. This protocol builds its multicast tree from the source, discovering routers that support the protocol in the network and using them to provide branching in the tree. The tree itself is managed in a decentralised fashion, with joining receivers finding parent routers through a limited, recursive search of the tree. On a participating node, information about the tree's structure is limited to the addresses of that node's children and its path through the tree back to the source. Unlike most other multicast protocols, a new receiver is connected to the tree using its forward path from the source and packets are delivered through the tree via hop-by-hop delivery over unicast connections between nodes. Lorikeet also actively maintains the tree structure using a localised rearrangement algorithm triggered by a topological change in the tree structure. This rearrangement allows the tree to remain efficient in the face of changes to the receiver population, which can change the shape of the tree over time. Lorikeet is designed to operate with no further protocol support than that provided by existing Internet unicast protocols. It requires none of the standard IP multicast infrastructure, such as Class D group addressing. Its use of unicast connections between nodes allows it to be deployed incrementa.lly on the network, and its behaviour will degrade to simultaneous unicast when no routers that support the protocol are present at all. However, significant performance gains can be achieved even when there are only a few supporting routers present in the network: Lorikeet produces trees with half the cost of a unicast tree when just 10% of routers are Lorikeet-capable. Lorikeet's tree construction and rearrangement algorithms generate multicast trees of comparable total cost to those created by algorithms of considerably higher message complexity, such as those that employ exhaustive searches of the tree during joins. We develop the Lorikeet protocol from a set of requirements based on its target application and the properties of the current Internet. After describing the protocol's behaviour, we analyse its message complexity and its performance in terms of tree cost. We also analyse several other multicast protocols from the research literature, comparing their performance to that of Lorikeet in both complete deployment and incremental deployment scenarios.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2007

Australian fruit growers face huge losses due to the damage sustained from flying vertebrate pests such as birds and flying foxes. Growers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in combating these pests due to the strict stipulations by the Department of Environment and Resource Management requiring all deterrent measures to be non-lethal. Some of the counter measures include canopy netting, tunnel netting, odour repellents, sounds, lights, scare guns, fruit bags and chemicals. These methods involve high capital and periodic maintenance costs and are rendered ineffective over a period of time since these pests are intelligent enough to find ways to overcome such obstacles. Thus, fruit growers are trying to find more effective methods to control the problem while trying to minimize their costs. Emerging trends in this area, particularly in the United States of America (USA), include the use of drones, automatic detection and warning systems, which in turn, can trigger a particular type of deterrent system and thereby protect crops. Infrared/laser scanning technologies has been found effective in detecting pests in small confined areas. Such technologies are usually customised to suit a particular geographical area and also the type of flying vertebrate pests being combated. This project is geared towards the development of a detection system which can effectively detect the presence of lorikeets in a lychee orchard in the Burnett region. Acoustic detection of bird species in the field environment is a challenging endeavour due to a complex mix of sound sources. Although there are several approaches to detect them, they are effective in only some particular situations. For example, infrared technology is effective in detecting pests in small confined area because of number of hardware components required while visual observation techniques require large amount of processing power. This shortcoming has prompted a study into the development of a sensor unit that can effectively detect flying vertebrate pests like lorikeets within the specified range under conditions typically found in lychee orchards. In this research, a new portable sensing device which uses a combination of acoustic sensors that can be used trigger a beacon or a sound whenever lorikeets are detected, was used. This sensor was tested during the lychee season of 2015/16 and has been found to be effective in detecting lorikeets up to 20 metres, with the detection rate ranging from 71% to 30% in the range of 2 metres to 12 metres. The detection system was customized to be effective in a specified range to detect lorikeet calls in lychee orchards. It is very cost effective and portable. Further, this is the first time that such a detection system has been used in a lychee orchard in the Wide Bay Burnett region and in wider Australia itself. These preliminary efforts possess great potential to explore the development of such devices to entail better crop management practices in the region.

Tese de mestrado, Biologia Evolutiva e do Desenvolvimento, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2019
Se a comunicação é a base de todas as interações e relações sociais, a comunicação acústica é uma das mais predominantes. Esta forma de transmissão e receção de sinais é muito variada e existe praticamente em todos os animais, mas há certamente alguns que se destacam. Os psitaciformes – ordem que inclui papagaios, araras, catatuas, periquitos, entre outros – são universalmente e historicamente reconhecidos não só pelas suas vocalizações inatas e aptidões de mímica, mas também pelas suas capacidades cognitivas, comparadas às dos primatas. A origem destas duas características ainda é discutida a nível evolutivo, neurobiológico, ecológico, fisiológico, comportamental e acústico. As principais hipóteses evolutivas que as procuram explicar – a social brain hypothesis e a relationship intelligence hypothesis (hipótese de cérebro social e hipótese de inteligência relacional) – baseiam-se muito na complexa estrutura social, na predominância de monogamia e na variação diária de estratégias de alimentação destas aves para o aparecimento destes atributos. Além do mais, os psitaciformes são de grande interesse para a investigação sobre a evolução da linguagem, visto exibirem deriva cultural devido a migração de indivíduos entre populações, resultando em dialetos nos reportórios vocais. Contudo, os psitaciformes estão ainda pouco estudados, sobretudo comparando com a sua fama mundial como mímicos e aves decorativas. São animais de estimação exóticos comuns cujas populações selvagens estão sob pressão devido ao tráfico internacional de longa data, e que, ao mesmo tempo, se tornaram invasores de ambientes diferentes do seu por escaparem de cativeiro ou por serem libertados intencionalmente. Graças a estas duas condições, estão em ação programas de conservação para aumentar os números das populações naturais de várias espécies deste grupo taxonómico em perigo, enquanto elementos de outras espécies se tornaram vizinhos numerosos e inesperados em áreas humanizadas. Propus-me a descrever os reportórios vocal e comportamental numa espécie australiana pouco conhecida de psitaciformes, os rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus moluccanus) ou lórios-arco-íris, e correlacioná-los com hipóteses de aprendizagem vocal e evolução de cognição. Esta espécie invasora exibe interações sociais complexas, neofilia e bioacústica diversa e ainda por estudar. Este objetivo foi conseguido através de observações e gravações de comportamento e vocalizações, durante várias semanas, e foram feitas análises estatísticas e acústicas usando espectrogramas e 20 parâmetros acústicos selecionados. Estas revelaram uma dinâmica de grupo complexa entre os 11 indivíduos analisados, com sinais de hierarquia independente do sexo através de interações agonísticas e o casal como a unidade social do grupo. Os seus reportórios comportamental e vocal aqui apresentados são os mais completos nesta espécie até agora, incluindo descrições de 45 comportamentos discretos e as características acústicas de 12 tipos de vocalizações distintos, com a respetiva associação contextual entre os dois repertórios. Um evento de acasalamento completamente registado, sem precedentes em lórios arco-íris, é descrito em detalhe do início ao fim. Adicionalmente, há indícios de uma possível convergência das vocalizações dentro do grupo, devido à falta de diferenças acústicas significativas entre as vocalizações dos indivíduos ou entre as dos dois sexos, o que poderia indicar uma adaptação de indivíduos de origens diferentes origens à vida num grupo fechado ao longo dos últimos anos. Grupos numerosos de Trichoglossus moluccanus têm surgido em algumas das maiores cidades da Austrália, uma mostra do forte poder adaptativo destes psitaciformes de comportamento complexo e capacidades vocais dinâmicas. Analisadas através de um estudo descritivo, algo raramente observado hoje em dia, estas características fazem desta espécie uma mais-valia na investigação tanto de populações selvagens como em cativeiro, em temas como a ecologia de psitaciformes, a influência da presença humana no seu comportamento, a evolução de dialetos e comportamentos ritualizados devido a diferenciação cultural, as capacidades de aprendizagem e mímica vocal, e por fim a evolução da cognição, inteligência e linguagem em geral e em não-primatas. Em simultâneo, descobertas em espécies como estas podem ajudar a melhorar esforços de conservação em espécies semelhantes em vias de extinção, ao aumentar o conhecimento sobre Psittaciformes e ao realçar a importância da assimilação cultural em programas de reintrodução.
Psittaciformes, or parrots, are universally and historically recognized not only for their innate vocalizations and mimicry skills, but also for their cognitive skills, compared to the ones of primates. The origin of these two features is still discussed, many times symbiotically, on various biological and scientific levels. The two main evolutionary hypotheses that explain these – the social brain hypothesis and the relationship intelligence hypothesis – greatly draw on the complex social structure, predominance of monogamy and daily foraging variety of these birds as a basis for the appearance of these attributes. Psittaciformes are, furthermore, of interest on the research of the evolution of language, since they too exhibit cultural drift from flow of individuals between populations, resulting in dialects in the vocalization repertoires. Parrots are, however, not very well studied in relation to their worldwide fame. They are common exotic pets whose wild populations are under threat due to long-lasting intense trading market, and at the same time have become invaders of new environments by escaping or being deliberately released. My aim was to describe the vocal and behavioural repertoires of a previously less-know Australian parrot, Trichoglossus moluccanus, or rainbow lorikeets, and correlate these with hypotheses on vocal learning and evolution of cognition. Through a descriptive study complete by and acoustical approach, these birds showed complex group dynamics between the 11 analysed individuals and evidence of a possible convergence of vocalizations within the group. Their behavioural and vocal repertoire here described are the most complete on this species so far, including 45 behaviours and the acoustic characteristics of 12 call types, with respective contextual association between the two. One fully recorded mating event, unprecedented in rainbow lorikeets, is described in detail. These features make this species one of good value for research on both its healthy wild and captive populations, on themes such as parrot ecology, the influence of the human presence on their behaviour, the evolution of dialects and ritualized behaviours from cultural differentiation, vocal learning and mimicry, and the evolution of non-primate and general cognition, intelligence and language. Findings on species such as these could help improve conservation efforts to similar endangered species, through the increase of knowledge on this taxonomic group, while calling attention to the importance of cultural assimilation in programs for reintroduction.