Medieval Seagulls to Modern Chaos – An Avian Opium Crisis
So you’ve signed up to an ancestry site, keen to find clues about why you are the way you are. You’re not the best at research, but thankfully, a distant cousin has already done all the work for you, mapping out a family tree back to the 1300s. As it turns out, one side of the family used to be very focused on fishing activities, but somewhere along the way, the genealogy got a little corporate. You already know you come from a long line of CEOs and managers, so maybe your fishing ancestors were the missing puzzle piece in your psyche. You yourself have become very good at playing the societal game, although occasionally you’ll catch yourself daydreaming about days out at sea. Although in the society you’re living in, non-conformity is a competitive disadvantage, so you suppress those thoughts with an after-work pub meal.
You’re a seagull.
Which brings us to two deeply pressing scientific questions:
- If chips were never invented, would seagulls have higher empathy levels?
- Did humans accidentally create a feathered capitalist society as a byproduct of their own, except with more anarchy sprinkled in?
Okay, now back into the human form. I recently found myself trying to envision seagulls in the Middle Ages, and I just couldn’t. Pigeons, fine, I could picture those down by the market square with flute-like tunes in the background. Crows? No problem, easy to picture a Murder hanging around a Medieval Cathedral. But Seagulls? It’s almost like they manifested here and now. Why is this? Could it be that we have so strongly intertwined seagulls with urban environments and snack thievery that we’ve almost forgotten they have their own little history?
Let’s dive into this with the enthusiasm of an Olympic swimmer.
The Butterfly Effect, But Make It a Chip
Upon the invention of the lightbulb, humanity was truly enlightened. Take away that invention, and perhaps half of us would be in the dark right now. Perhaps, or rather, perchance, our invention of the chip was as impactful on seagull evolution as the invention of artificial light was on us.
Let’s start with the appearance of the chip. We can estimate that the first potato chip, where a chip is defined as a thin-enough cooked potato slice, was around 1853. The majority of reports tell a story of the chef, George Crum, stumbling upon this golden discovery in response to a disgruntled and perfectionistic potato-focused customer.1 For full disclosure, it should be noted that the accuracy of this history is as murky as the bottom of an infrequently serviced chip fryer. So more broadly, we can safely assume that someone invented the first chip sometime between the 17th and 19th centuries. Personally, though, I prefer to run with the George Crum story, due to a satisfying example of nominative determinism (Google it and you won’t be disappointed).
Jumping back to the seagull perspective, this first chip invention was akin to the first person successfully mining gold. The speed at which you can mine gold, of course, and therefore the amount, depends on the tools you have at hand. Just as the gold rush only exploded once people had things like shovels and dynamite, the great chip rush only occurred once we invented the potato peeler. Gold, however, means nothing to seagulls, as they’re relatively indifferent to shiny items and have no use for investment funds. Chips, though, may as well be the bird-equivalent of opium.
Now, imagine a seagull friend group with three members sometime in the late 1920s. A store selling salted-starchy gold just opened up by the sea. Until now, your group has often spent copious amounts of time out over the ocean, dining on the finest varieties of fish. But Bill, one of the friends in the group, has a streak of curiosity. He’s always been adventurous and bold, often the first to swoop down on the fanciest of fish. He wants to check out the store, intrigued by the delicious scents emanating from the joint. Phil, however, is more hesitant, as he feels the increasing human presence by the coastline threatens his fundamental rights. Greg is relatively indifferent, but Bill convinces him to come along to investigate, while Phil stays back.
Fast-forward 20 years, and Bill is now the CEO of the company known as ChipnSteal Inc., while Greg is a loyal employee. Phil, however, is nowhere to be found, suspected to have moved out to the faraway coastal islands, pushed into relocation due to humans taking away most of the local fish. And now, in modern times, you can be sure those hyper-focused, feathered chip thieves you see around are far more similar to Bill and Greg than they are Phil.
The Accidental Rise of Feathered Capitalism
From a human perspective, gull behaviour looks chaotic, antisocial, even criminal. But, from a behavioural perspective, it’s simply an expected result of a species shaped by evolutionary pressures and subject to resource scarcity. Modern seagull behaviour mirrors what happens when you give someone a highly dopamine-spiking substance, snatch it away, then dangle it on a string and get baffled when they leap for it.
Humanoid research indicates that the composition of the microbiome (the lil microbes in the digestive system that need you just as much as you need them) can influence personality.2 You can think of microbiome populations like groups of people that each speak different dialects. Force every community to speak English, and you erase nuance, disrupt harmony, and lose half the culture in the process.
Chips do something similar. They don’t just feed the gull — they fuel the Machiavellian, chip-loving microbes who will fight relentlessly for their next starchy fix. And the microbes that love the fresh fish? Well, those are put on the backbench, forced to fast for weeks on end while the chip-loving microbes are constantly fed. Combine the microbe changes with the dopamine spikes and dips that come along with a chip-heavy diet, and it’s not hard to see why seagulls are behaving like feathered drug addicts. Here, the drug is the chip, and the manufacturer is us. Therefore, we, as a species, have inadvertently become to seagulls what Big Pharma (a.k.a. the pharmaceutical industry) is to us.
And what choice do they have? As humans, if we really wanted to, some of us could opt out of supermarket convenience by attempting (not successfully in my case) to grow our own food. But Seagulls? We’ve essentially mostly taken away their equivalent of soil and seeds, leaving them no option but to depend on our inadvertent chip handouts.
Conclusion
Seagulls that were once organic fish coinnoseurs may as well be treated as an ancient relic. Today’s urban gulls are shaped by a hyper-competitive system — one that rewards boldness, discourages cooperation, and feeds on dopamine-spiked chip rewards. If their behaviour makes us uncomfortable, it may be because evolution is holding up a mirror, showing us exactly what happens when you push a population into scarcity and competition. In truth, seagulls aren’t thieves. They’re merely well adapted to the game we accidentally built for them. Mass-manufacture addictive potato-esque molecules, and you’ll be sure to incite some feathered fiends.
If you’d like to explore more bird-related existentialism, I’ve also written about how much personality is hiding in Latin species names.
References
- Lenz, P. (2025, June 13). A history of… crisps (potato chips). https://www.gethistories.com/p/a-history-of-crisps-potato-chips
- Johnson, K. V.-A. (2020). Gut microbiome composition and diversity are related to human personality traits. Human Microbiome Journal, 15, None. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humic.2019.100069