Talk:Blue-footed booby

Pictures

If you need pictures of boobies (the birds, that is), there's a well-known troll, woot, on the liberal political blog Eschaton who posts messages claiming free pictures of boobies (the human female kind) but are actually of the avian kind. If you can get in contact with woot might be able to provide a picture of the blue-footed booby for you. --Robert Merkel 04:09, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Any problem removing some of the pictures? Or else reorganizing them so it does not mess up the formatting of the text? Pnkrockr 14:55, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

The text isn't yet long enough for a complete article. In that light, all the pictures are valuable in my opinion. But they could be reorganised. Chris Box 21:32, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Looks much better. Excellent job! Pnkrockr 22:29, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry i butted into this, but I had the diving sequences and thought they would fit in well. --eukaryotica 17:26, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Passeriformes? RK Pelicaniformes!

Why are Blue footed Booby feet blue, anyway? I know it has something to do with the blood vessels in the feet, but I can't seem to figure out how. Mixmastermind 03:40, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I think not, gannets and boobies have pigments in the feet, and in some cases at least (eg Northern Gannet) the colours differ between male and female. Any bird with blood the colour of a blue-foot's feet would be in serious trouble. jimfbleak 07:06, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

To be fair, blood vessels can be blue in appearance as well. Plus, it's because of how blood flows through their feet that Boobies can warm their young.Mixmastermind 07:43, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

The first paragraph...

The first paragraph isn't exactly up to par for Wikipedia's content standards...

One specific part... "The blue-footed booby usually lays one to three eggs at a time. The species practices asynchronous hatching, which means that eggs that are laid first are hatched before the consequent eggs..." I think consequent should be subsequent. EETech (talk) 11:29, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Name

One thing that should be noted is that in Spanish and in Ecuador specifically were the bird is native from, i'ts name is "Piquero de patas azules" and has nothing to do with the word "booby" or "bobo" I, living in Ecuador, have never heard of it being named as a "bobo", "piquero" literally meaning "pikeman" ( I guess it has something to do with them using small sticks in their beaks when they mate but I can't source that right now)

Edits

New content has been added by Nicole Salzieder and Michelle Van Ert, as part of the Introductory Animal Biology coursework (Fall 2007) at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. The changes were also reviewed by two other students. Bala Thiagarajan (talk) 20:06, 23 November 2007 (UTC) Bala Thiagarajan (Instructor)

breeding

"To observers, this looks very weird, but this is how the blue-footed boobies mate. The blue-footed booby is a comical bird to watch. Males do a dance to attract the females. The dance includes the males lifting their blue feet high and throwing their heads up."

This sounds like it was written by an eight-year-old. To make matters worse, it repeats information that is already in the article. Would someone please remove this. 154.20.0.54 19:12, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization

is there some wonderful reason to put upper-case letters at the beginning of 'blue' and 'booby' that i don't understand? have these words become proper nouns by being applied to a bird? should 'robin' now be capitalized? b betswiki (talk) 18:10, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

It is a convention for bird names. Every common name for a bird species on the wiki has capitalised letters. Letters after the hyphen are not capitalized, so "-footed" is not capitalized. Snowman (talk) 18:17, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

See also proper name. Just like it isn't the "Manhattan bridge" either. Dysmorodrepanis (talk)

The blue color

If possible, it would be better to describe why the birds have "blue feet" since the title is named with the color instead of science name? --Caspian blue 13:19, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes (I guess...) - I have not seen any discussion of why the brid has blue feet though...Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:17, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, is the situation in which you can not find "no discussion" on why the bird has the color on the feet, referring to "forums" or "scholarship"? I believe if we dig up harder, there would be some answers on the question. I've found some interesting sources to say that blue colors depends their nutrition status, and are associated to mating.[1][2] Unlike the cold color, the feet temperature is quite warm (really interesting to me), so a hatched chick is sitting on the feet of the mother bird for one month(photo) because they can not control their body temperature.--Caspian blue 22:28, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Go for it - you are welcome to add the information then :) Casliber (talk · contribs) 01:18, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, I merely intended to throw a question just out of curiosity in hope that somebody knowledgeable of the subject gives me some answer. After the mission is fulfilled, I was planning to move on to know about other interesting mammals :-) And writing mammal articles requires me to read other similar articles and learn about styles and naming conventions,etc., but I'm lazy to do so and a beginner of writing mammal articles, so I think I can wait until somebody write about the blue feet mystery.--Caspian blue 17:16, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I think the section on colour is a bit misleading. The blue colour isn't due to carotenoids, because carotenoids aren't blue -- they are yellow/orange/red. The linked reference doesn't say carotenoids are responsible for the blue, it says that the colour varies "from dull blue to bright green" and *this* variation is due to carotenoids (blue +yellow =green). It doesn't say anything about the source of the blue component. Tslumley (talk) 07:33, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

I've clarified the source of the blue color. The existing citation is to an abstract of an article. The abstract hints at the full explanation, but I don't have access to the full article. I have added a link to a New York Times article that gives a bit more explanation of the cause of the coloration, and is consistent with the cited abstract. - Donald Albury 17:08, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Run-on sentence with atrocious punctuation

"The name booby comes from the Spanish term bobo, which means "stupid" or "fool"/"clown". This is because the Blue-footed Booby is clumsy on land, and (like other seabirds), they can be very unwary and therefore easily captured, killed, and eaten by humans."

This sentence should read:

The name booby comes from the Spanish term bobo (which means 'stupid' or 'fool' or 'clown') because the Blue-footed Booby is (like other seabirds) clumsy on land. They are easily captured, killed, and eaten by humans.

I don't think the author responsible for the word 'unwary' really meant 'unwary'. I would never try to divine the mental state of a bird but would certainly agree that they are clumsy and have a difficult time escaping as a consequence, no matter how wary or unwary they might be.

I would change the article but edits appear to be turned off.154.5.45.119 (talk) 10:34, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Good points. Go ahead. Edits are not turned off (article is not edit protected). -- Alexf^(talk) 12:00, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Assignment for Behavioral ecology Class

This article is a solid start, containing basic descriptions of the habitat locations, behaviors, and physical characteristics of the Blue-footed Boobies. All topics were very succinct and some areas were quite underdeveloped. For example, it was mentioned that the birds were “strictly marine” and only came on land to breed, but most of the following topics were then about their behavior on land, and there was very little discussion of their activity on the ocean other than hunting and feeding (ie. How do they adapt to lives spent out at sea? Are they solitary animals when not breeding? Do they rest and sleep on the waves?) There was also a paragraph about “Rearing young,” which contained information about biparental care. However, there was no mention of the intense sibling rivalry described by our textbook, and in fact the Wikipedia article never goes into the behavior of siblicide commonly seen in Blue-footed booby broods when food is scarce. It also never mentions an important fact about egg incubation leading to siblicide: that boobies start incubating their first egg four days before the next one, so the first chick has a four day’s advantage over its younger sibling, meaning that it is dominant in the nest and can attack the younger one when there is not enough food. Ihyuan (talk) 21:39, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Future Edits

Hello! I am a student at Washington University in St. Louis and I will be contributing to this article quite a bit this semester for a Behavioral Ecology class. I am especially interested in parental care and family conflicts, so I will primarily be adding information about that. However, my goal is to expand and broaden the article in all aspects, so that it will eventually be qualified for Good Article! Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments. Ihyuan (talk) 18:38, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Evaluation

For this article, I made some slight changes to writing style, including editing for proper grammar and some changes in word choice. These were mostly small changes and some slight rewording for efficiency and clarity. I also noted several places where citations are needed. I also added some missing words and fixed some typos and misused words. Finally, I expanded some sentences to further elaborate on certain points.

I would suggest elaborating on the introduction portion of the article, providing just a brief overview of the species and some of the topics later discussed in great detail.

Very good article though.

--Cobiorower (talk) 02:02, 17 October 2012 (UTC)cobiorower

Hi Irene, I enjoyed reading your additions to this article. They were very informative and well cited--this supplemented what we learned in class in an intuitive way. The experiments you referenced were thorough and distinct enough to get the point across easily. I think Eamon tidied your piece up enough that I didn't really see any issues with grammar or your uses of word choice. I bolded the hypotheses to make them more easily readable to viewers, and they help partition between the sentences. I added an extra space between paragraphs under facultative siblicide to make it more readable. I think it helps the readers to not get caught up with all of the words in a block of text. One final note, could you include why parents would want to come into conflict with the older chick in order to 'level the playing field?' Alexliu818 (talk) 04:16, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I made some minor edits by changing some grammar such as comma splices and run-on sentences. I also noticed an initial version having “serves mainly purposes” which was changed to “serves many purposes”, which I changed to “two main purposes” to preserve the initial meaning of the first author. I also added some hyperlinks. Zhangt2413 (talk) 04:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

This whole article is very informative. I learnt a lot about the booby and I think that the article definitely covers the material well. However, I noticed that there were several fragment sentences that I thought took away from the flow of the article. These fragments could probably be combined with the previous sentence via semicolon. I also noticed a couple sentences that I thought were awkwardly worded so I edited them a bit. Great article. Jeremy.winkler (talk) 20:38, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Edits

I added a few new sections today, including one about Natal Dispersal, a paragraph under "Rearing Young" and Long-term Effects of Brood Hierarchies. I also re-wrote the Foot-Pigmentation section, adding more experimental results. Ihyuan (talk) 14:23, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

This article is very well written. It has got a rich source of information. I adjusted the organization of the article to include all behavior-related topics under one heading, "Behavior and Ecology". I also added a bunch of Wikipedia links and marked the places where additional citations may be needed. Though it is not required in our class project, it may be helpful if more details are put regarding the habitat and distribution of blue-footed booby. Great job overall! --Tianyi Cai (talk) 02:21, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey, Ihyuan! Your contribution to the blue-footed Booby page is coming along great. After previous edits, the organization of the page and flow of your collective writing has been worked into this page well. It's an informative read about an interesting species, and the literature cited here is incorporated nicely. My only additions were a couple grammatical edits (passive voice, comma use, etc.) and linking to other Wiki articles. Your most recent additions have really added to the page, however you may want to re-arrange parts to include the Foot-Pigmentation section within the Description section, where the project seems to want all the physical characteristics to be. In addition, this article is moving way past its Start-status categorization. You may look to get this updated soon. Looking forward to tracking the progress of this article! Nsavalia23 (talk) 04:28, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

More revisions

The past few days, I and two other classmates have been sprucing up this article. We've mostly fixed grammatical errors and added citations where needed (those seemed to be what held this article from reaching GA status previously). I hope our contributions helped! Thatgirlnamedsofa (talk) 00:53, 28 September 2013 (UTC)thatgirlnamedsofa

Re: More revisions

Like the above poster said, we addressed many of the issues brought up in the GA review. All the [citation needed] tags have been fixed, all the references in the refslist have consistent formatting, and the clarity of the writing has been improved. We hope that eventually this article can be renominated for Good Article.Solon5g93 (talk) 22:26, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

I was also on the team. Some information that was not accurately cited was either removed from the article or cited. Now all of the information in the article has been verified. We believe that this article is now ready for GA review.--Npatel92 (talk) 19:55, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

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