Scientists studied flamingo personalities and discovered the pink birds form cliques like high schoolers

• New research found that flamingos form cliques based on their personality.
• More submissive birds hung out with each other whereas louder, outgoing birds had their own groups.
• Understanding flamingo social structure could help zoo keepers when moving birds between zoos.

If you were to spend time among a flock of flamingos, you might notice it's not all that different from your high school days.

Some flamingos are pushy and loud, some are quiet and submissive, but all of them have a unique personality and tend to form cliques based around each other's quirks, according to new research.

Lead author of the study Paul Rose is what you might call a flamingo fan. He's been analyzing flamingos in captivity for most of his career to help not only zoo keepers but the birds, too.

Why flamingos form cliques

Rose has already found from previous research that flamingos like to hang out the most with just a few specific birds — you could call them "friends". And these close friendships can last for many years.

But what Rose and his colleagues at the University of Exeter and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust didn't know, and set out to determine with their new study, was why flamingos choose certain birds over others for these long-lasting relationships.

"We wanted to find out whether individual character traits explain why these friendships form," Rose, a member of the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at the University of Exeter, said in a press release.

To find the answer, Rose and his colleagues looked at two captive flocks of different species of flamingos — Caribbean and Chilean flamingos. 

For each flamingo they determined a personality score based on how much a bird exhibited three types of behavioral traits — aggression, exploration, and submissiveness. Essentially, the higher the personality score, the more outgoing and extroverted the bird.

They found that birds who shared similar personality traits spent the most time with each other. And these cliques might also influence flamingo's social structure.

For example, groups of aggressive flamingos were more likely to start squabbles with other flamingos over control of things like food or nesting sites. 

"Whereas submissive birds will be less exploratory, less adventurous, and more likely to wait to see what other birds are doing and follow along," Rose told Insider.

Submissive flamingos don't usually start fights, but they will defend themselves from aggressive members of the flock, their research showed.

Though more aggressive flamingos sometimes had better access to resources due to their boldness, submissive flamingos might just be using a different strategy to achieve the same ends, Rose said.

"If you don't want to spend a lot of your time being aggressive and sorting out fights, you're going to hang out with birds that are similar to you. Then you can spend more time feeding, foraging, preening your feathers, and looking after yourself," Rose said.

Additionally, the study showed that flamingos provided their close associates with social support. For submissive flamingos, this meant joining in to defend their friends when an aggressive flamingo started a fight.

Caribbean flamingos behave differently from their Chilean cousins

The personalities of flamingos seem to influence more than just who they spend time with. They also correlate with their social roles — at least in the case of Caribbean flamingos.

Caribbean flamingos with higher personality scores — basically, those with "bigger" personalities — seemed to form stronger and more frequent social connections to other flamingos in the flock, the research found. They also tended to engage in more fights, both as winners and losers, and provided more social support to other flamingos.

For unknown reasons, Chilean flamingo's personalities didn't seem to predict their social role in the same way.

Rose suggests this difference between the species might be due to ecology: "The Chilean flamingo is a much more specialized bird, so it might have a more nuanced behavior pattern that we haven't discovered yet."

How understanding Flamingos' social behavior could help zoos

Flamingos are often moved between zoos to help maintain genetic diversity in the flocks. If you had to move abruptly, you would probably find comfort in a friendly face — flamingos are likely no different. Zookeepers could help flamingos' social lives by keeping friends together.

Rose also recommends zoos keep larger flamingo flocks, if they're able. That way, each flamingo — with its specific quirks and personality — could have more opportunities to find like-minded friends.

"These birds must be clever in a way — if they know who their friends are, if they know who to avoid, and they know who to socialize with," Rose said. "Because clearly, having and expressing a personality is important to the daily lives of flamingos. So we should cater to that in the flocks that we manage."