Birds and snakes. Metaphorically, these will be the protagonists of the prequel to The Hunger Games, which opens this Friday, November 17, in Spanish cinemas. It’s time to review the trilogy so as not to lose a single one of the references made to it, even though it is a story from earlier in time. And, therefore, it is time to hear about a bird again: the Mockingjay.
This bird is by no means a secondary character. In fact, it appears numerous times in the plot and even gives its name to the last part of the trilogy, both books and movies. However, it is not an animal that we can find in an ornithology manual, basically because does not exist.
We must remember that, despite the clothing and other confusing devices, The Hunger Games tells a futuristic world, in which some scientific tools, such as genetic engineering, are the order of the day. And the mockingjay is precisely the result of these techniques. Therefore, we might wonder if a mockingjay could be created in real life. Even if, if necessary, it could be used for such purposes unethical like those that initially led to its obtaining in the history of Suzanne Collins. The answer to this question is somewhat complex. We could simplify it with a “no”, but a few more details are necessary.
Where does the mockingjay come from? The Hunger Games?
It should be noted that mockingjay is the invented translation of an English term, also invented. The term invented by Suzanne Collins is mockingjaysince it results from the crossing between mockingbird and eurasian jay. The mocking bird is a bird native to North America, known in Spanish as mockingbird. As for the Eurasian jay, it is a bird of the crow family, known in Spanish as jay. Mockingbird, more jay, mockingjay.
But in reality, in the books and movies of The Hunger Games the mockingjay was not created deliberately. What was obtained through genetic engineering is the chatterboxa variation of the jay, capable of listen to and reproduce a human conversation in its entirety.
These birds were sent from the Capitol to spy on the population. However, the rebels realized this and began returning them with false information. Aware that they were no longer of any use, the members of the capitol expelled the babblers into the wild, where they began to reproduce with the mockingbirds, giving rise to mockingjays, which since then became a symbol of rebellion.
Life makes its way
In reality, although with very different animals, in The Hunger Games a situation similar to that of jurassic park. The creators of the chatterboxes made it so that only males were born, so that They could not reproduce among themselves.
However, once in nature, although there were no females of their species, they saw an alternative in female mockingbirds. It is different from what happens in jurassic park, because in this case the females reproduce without a male, through a process known as parthenogenesis, which also exists in reality. But even so, it is a clear example that life makes its wayas the mathematician Ian Malcom explains in the first of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic saga films,
This is something that is taken into account when obtaining animals through genetic editing today. Even when obtaining plants, one must also consider what would happen if they reproduce independently in the wild. Now, returning to the mockingjay, we already know that in real life a genetically edited bird could have reproduced with another wild. But could chatter have existed?
The science behind the bird The Hunger Games
Neither the movies nor the books detail in detail the science behind obtaining the chatter. But let’s think about how it could be done.
Something quite realistic is that they chose the jay as the basis for their creation. The corvids, in general, They are very intelligent animals, as can well be seen with the crows. But jays are also spies by nature. Usually they spy on other birds of the same species to see where they hide the food and be able to get hold of it if they are careless.
If you could really choose a bird to turn into a spy, this would be the perfect base to work on. But here comes the difficult part. Thanks to genetic engineering, you can modify the DNA of a living beingto eliminate unwanted features or add others of interest.
But those new features of interest must be genetically viable. That is, if we seek to obtain a bird with the ability to reproduce human conversations, there should be a gene that grants that quality. The only animals capable of doing this are humans themselves, and our way of communicating is not something so simple as to enclose it in a gene, which could also be introduced into the genome of other species very far from ours.
That’s why, with real-life science, you wouldn’t have been able to get a chatterbox. And if the chatterbox doesn’t exist, neither can the mockingjay.
Talking birds
Okay, maybe we have lied a little, there are birds that speak or imitate what they hear. The case of the parrots. Although there are also other birds that go much further, being able to imitate all kinds of sounds. It is the case of superb lyrebirdbecause a chainsaw imitates the same thing as the laughter of a human being.
The problem is that these animals do not have the memory enough to reproduce a complete conversation, much less if a long time has passed since they heard it. It would be necessary to train them and, perhaps, also alter genes related to their memory. With current science, that is not possible.
But the good thing about The Hunger Gamesas well as its prequel, is that they are fictional stories, so they can allow themselves to give science advances that it does not have and will hardly ever have.
Luckily, even if it were to happen, a bioethics committee I would never allow a bird to develop with the aim of spying on the population. Yet another reason why the mockingjay could never come into existence.