Most instagrammable bird is!
statespaper.com
Have you ever thought of which is the most instagrammable bird?
Seems like our scientists has found the answer to the question. a recently published study that asked “what makes a great bird photo?” has officially deemed the frogmouth the most instagrammable of avians.
In a new study published this week in i-Perception, scientists document their search for the most Instagrammable bird. They collected and analyzed more than 23,000 bird photos from nine of the most popular bird accounts, noting the number of likes while accounting for factors like how long the picture had been online and how many accounts the photo had reached.
Researchers concluded the surprising winner is the frogmouth, an unusual-looking nocturnal bird found in Southeast Asia and Australia.
“This seems to be a matter of poetic justice, as this nocturnal bird with very distinct facial features was once designated ‘the world’s most unfortunate-looking bird,'” the study authors wrote.
The aesthetic appeal of a photo often has little to do with conventional notions of beauty, according to the study. A bird’s color may motivate users to “like” an Instagram photo — blue and red birds generate more likes than yellow and green ones, the study found. But often the more unique or unusual an animal looks, the more people respond to it, said Katja Thömmes, a postdoctoral researcher at the University Hospital Jena in Germany and one of the authors of the study.
Frogmouths are worth Googling if you’ve never seen one before. These often grumpy looking nocturnal birds, native to Southeast Asia and Australia, are strange to look at. Some look disheveled. Others, downright reptilian.
The researchers also studied which bird colors most attracted viewers, and found that blue and red bird photos had the highest IAA scores.
But why did the unusual-looking frogmouth take the prize? The bird often looks disheveled and has bright yellow eyes and a wide beak. Its scientific name, Podargus strigoides, is derived from the Latin word for owl-like (strigoides) and Ancient Greek for gout (podargus). This is because the bird is often mistaken for an owl and walks like an old man with gout. It also has front-facing eyes, says Tim Snyder, a bird curator at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. He speculates that makes the frogmouth more personable and humanlike.
The more you look at frogmouths, the more their charm grows on you. Plus, beauty is not the only contributor to aesthetic supremacy. The study authors write that “presumably, interestingness, idiosyncrasy, and the situational context all play their part in the aesthetic appeal of bird photos to the human observer.”
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it’s also not the only thing that matters.
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