Try not to copy (Image: Juniors Bildarchiv GmbH/Alamy)

The common pet budgerigar is loved for its ability to mimic its owners. But it has another special trick – it can catch yawns from other budgies, suggesting it has some kind of empathy.

“Practically all vertebrates yawn,” says Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni of City University, London. In 2008, he showed that dogs can catch yawns from humans. The only other species shown to yawn contagiously are humans, chimpanzees and a type of rodent called the high-yawning Sprague-Dawley rat. But Andrew Gallup of the State University of New York and his colleagues have now shown for the first time that the same happens for a species of non-mammals.

To see whether budgies, a sociable parrot species, can make each other yawn, his team designed two experiments. In the first, budgies were placed in adjacent cages, either with a barrier between them, or with nothing obstructing their view of each other. They found that, when budgies could see each other, they were around three times as likely to yawn within five minutes of a yawn from their neighbour.


In their second experiment, budgies were shown a video – either one that showed clips of budgies yawning, or one that had no yawning at all. Every bird that watched the yawning video also yawned, while fewer than half of the birds shown the other video yawned.

What’s the catch?

“Thus far, yawning has been demonstrated to be contagious in a few highly social species,” said Gallup. “To date, this is the first experimental evidence of contagious yawning in a non-mammalian species.”

Joly-Mascheroni says that the purpose is not yet clear for any species, adding that “the specifics of the phenomenon seem to differ between species.” Humans and adult chimps seem more likely to catch a yawn when the original yawner is someone they know, but experiments in puppies have not found the same familiarity effect, and the researchers didn’t see this in budgies either. “Depending on the species, contagious yawning may serve different purposes,” says Joly-Mascheroni.

But the finding in budgies isn’t just a cute novelty; because contagious yawning seems to be linked with empathetic processes, Gallup says this suggests that other social non-mammals may have basic forms of empathy.

“Contagious yawning by itself is not exactly empathy, but it hints at the tendency to mimic and synchronise with the bodies of others,” says Frans de Waal of Emory University in Georgia. “This process is probably the basis of mammalian empathy.”

De Waal thinks this is a good starting point for examining empathy in other types of animal. “Until now, most empathy research has been on mammals,” he says. “Empathy may turn out to be a mechanism even more widespread than we think, which is all the more remarkable given that it was thought just one or two decades ago that empathy was uniquely human.”

Journal reference: Animal Cognition DOI: 10.1007/s10071-015-0873-1