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