Blue-footed booby
The blue-footed booby is a specialized fish eater, feeding on small schooling fish such as sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and flying fish. It will also take squid and offal. The blue-footed booby hunts by diving into the ocean after prey, sometimes from a great height, and can also swim underwater in pursuit of its prey. It can hunt singly, in pairs, or in larger flocks. Boobies travel in parties of about 12 to areas of water with large schools of small fish. When the lead bird sees a fish shoal in the water, it will signal to the rest of the group and they will all dive in unison, pointing their bodies down like arrows.
Blue-footed booby
However, booby parents may not be as indifferent as they seem. Experimental evidence suggests that the parental behavior described above may be masking parent-offspring conflict. It was discovered that blue-footed booby parents make steep-sided nests that serve to deter the early ejection of the younger chick by the older sibling. This is in direct contrast to the masked booby, a species in which siblicide is obligate due to the ease in which older siblings can eject younger chicks from their flat nests. When blue-footed booby nests were experimentally flattened, parents restored them to their original steepness. In another experiment, blue-footed booby chicks that were placed in masked booby nests were more likely to engage in siblicide, which reveals that parental care somehow affects the level of siblicide. Parents also appear to respond more frequently to chicks that are in poorer body conditions during periods of food deprivation. Egg-mass analysis shows that in clutches produced at the beginning of the breeding season, the second egg in a nest were, on average, 1.5% heavier than the first. Since heavier eggs give rise to heavier chicks that have greater fitness, this evidence indicates that parents may try to rectify any disadvantages that accompany a late hatching date by investing more into the second egg. Hormonal analysis of eggs also shows that there appears to be no parental favoritism in regards to androgen allocation. It is important to note, however, that this may simply be that the species has evolved simpler ways to manipulate asymmetries and maximize parental reproductive output. Experiments show that what may at first appear to be parental cooperation with the elder chick may in fact mask a genetic parent-offspring conflict.