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You know how a group of crows is called a murder? Turns out that murder can be pretty scary.
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Hey guys Julia here for DNews
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so we know how crazy smart animals like dolphins, pigs, chimps and octopuses, octopi are…
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right? Oh god I might have to talk about cephalopods in a future episode, god they’re cool. Anyway,
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have you thought about that murder of crows sitting outside your house?
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Yeah those guys are crazy smart.
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Scientists used to think that one of things that separated humans from animals was the
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making of and use of tools, like spears and stuff. But that all changed when researchers
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like Jane Goodall realized that chimps use sticks as tools to get ants out of logs. Suddenly
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humans didn’t look so smart anymore.
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Scientists consider the corvid family, which includes crows, magpies, and ravens, some
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of the smartest among birds.
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I guess big things come in small packages. Despite that tiny brain span, crows are no
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bird brains.
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One of the most famous examples of crow intelligence is the way they make hooks to get food. One
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study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions B found that crows on New Caledonia,
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a South Pacific island, take stripes of leaves and shape them into hooks to get food out
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of tricky places, like grubs out of tree stumps.
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Another study in PLOS One found that they understand complex concepts like water displacement.
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Like in Aesops fables when a bird drops a pebble in a glass to raise the water level
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so he can drink it, they can actually do that.
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There’s all sorts of stories of crows getting clever for food. In Japan, crows will place
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walnuts in the middle of the road, then fly away and wait for a car to drive over them,
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cracking it open. If it doesn’t work the first time, the crow will move the walnut
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to another place in the road and try again.
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I mean most human kids don’t know how to use a tool to get something they want before
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the age of two and can’t understand volume displacement until the age of 5 or 7. So you
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could say crows are smarter than your average child. that is terrifying.
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And some studies show that they understand analogies and there’s some anecdotal evidence
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that crows do stuff for the fun of it, like sledding down a snowy roof on a bottle cap
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or putting poop in deer’s ears. Yeah I’m not kidding on that one.
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How do they do this if they have such tiny and different brains. Well one study published
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in the journal Nature Communications describes how. Most of our big brained smarts lies in
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the prefrontal cortex. Scientists think this area is responsible for things like reason
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and controlling emotions. But birds don’t have this. Their smarts evolved convergently,
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or independently from ours. Instead, the seat of crow’s intelligence lies in the nidopallium
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caudolaterale. This part of the brain helps the crow form memories, learn and even make
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predictions.
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Why did they evolve such complicated brains? I mean they are birds. Researchers think their environment plays
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a big role. The crow family can be found in variety of ecosystems and eat a variety of
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food, so they’d have to be able to adapt to changing landscapes. Like humans, they
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are very social creatures. And solving both social and ecological problems required bigger
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brains.
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and one last note, don’t be a dick to a bird. He’ll remember. Scientists from the
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university of Washington found that the birds would remember faces that were mean to them in the past.
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Whenever the researchers walked around campus, the birds that they had previously
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captured or trapped would scold them! But not just those birds, other crows that had
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never been trapped before also scolded the researchers! Which means the crows are a talking.
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If you piss one off, you might piss off a whole murder.
