Brandon Keim - Evolution’s Contrarian Capacity for Creativity

From Nautilus, Facts So Romantic on Biology, this is an interesting article on creativity in evolution. The author begins with two small songbirds - small songbird known as the willow tit, closely related—Poecile montanus to Poecile atricapillus—to the black-capped chickadee.

To the naked eye, there’s not much to distinguish between them. Both are small, with black-and-white heads and gray-black wings, seed-cracking bills, and a gregarious manner. For a long time, they were even thought to be the same species. The only obvious difference, at least with the willow tit I saw, was a duskier olive underbelly coloration.

These two nearly identical birds are a nice jumping off place for a discussion of diversity in evolution.

Evolution’s Contrarian Capacity for Creativity

Posted By Brandon Keim on Jul 02, 2014


The easily confused willow tit and black-capped chickadee f.c.franklin via Flickr / Brandon Keim
ONE OF MY favorite pastimes while traveling is watching birds. Not rare birds, mind you, but common ones: local variations on universal themes of sparrow and chickadee, crow and mockingbird.

I enjoy them in the way that other people appreciate new food or architecture or customs, and it can be a strange habit to explain. You’re 3,000 miles from home, and less interested in a famous statue than the pigeon on its head?! Yet there’s something powerfully fascinating about how familiar essences take on slightly unfamiliar forms; an insight, even, into the miraculous essence of life, a force capable of resisting the universe’s otherwise inevitable tendency to come to rest.

Take, for example, a small songbird known as the willow tit, encountered on a recent trip to Finland and closely related—Poecile montanus to Poecile atricapillus—to the black-capped chickadee, the official bird of my home state of Maine. To the naked eye, there’s not much to distinguish between them. Both are small, with black-and-white heads and gray-black wings, seed-cracking bills, and a gregarious manner. For a long time, they were even thought to be the same species. The only obvious difference, at least with the willow tit I saw, was a duskier olive underbelly coloration.

Which raises a question, asked by Darwin and J. B. S. Haldane and generations of biologists since: Why? Why is a bird, similar in so many ways to another, different in this one? It’s a surprisingly tricky question.

Generally speaking, we tend to think of evolution in purposeful terms: There must be a reason for difference, an explanation grounded in the chances of passing on one’s supposedly selfish genes. Perhaps those olive feathers provide a better camouflage in amidst Finnish vegetation, or have come to signify virility in that part of the world. As evolutionary biologists Suzanne Gray and Jeffrey McKinnon describe in Trends in Ecology and Evolution review (pdf), differences in color are sometimes favored by natural selection—except, that is, when they’re not.

Often differences in color don’t have any function at all; they just happen to be. They emerge through what’s known as neutral evolution: mutations randomly spreading through populations. At times, this spread, this genetic drift, evenly distributes throughout the entire population, so the whole species changes together. Sometimes, though, the mutations confine themselves to different clusters within a species, like blobs of water cohering on a shower floor. 

One can imagine life evolving again and again, crashing on the rocks of time and circumstance, until finally it hit upon just the right mutation rate—one that eons later would produce organisms and species and ecosystems.

Given enough time and space, these processes can—at least theoretically, as experiments necessary for conclusive evidence would take millennia to run—generate new species. Such appears to be the case with greenish warblers living around the Tibetan plateau, who during the last 10,000 years have diverged into multiple, non-interbreeding populations, even though there are no geographic barriers separating them or evidence of local adaptations favored by natural selection. The raw material of life simply diversified. One became many, because that’s just what it does¹.

Through this lens, evolution is an intrinsically generative force, with diversity proceeding ineluctably from the very existence of mutation. And here one can step back for a moment, go all meta, and ask: Where does mutation itself come from? How did evolution, and evolvability, evolve?

It’s a question on the bleeding edge of theoretical biology, and one studied by Joanna Masel at the University of Arizona. Her work suggests that, several billion years ago, when life consisted of self-replicating chemical arrangements, a certain amount of mutation was useful: After all, it made adaptation possible, if merely at the level of organized molecules persisting in gradients of heat and chemistry. There couldn’t be too much of it, though. If there were, the very mechanics of replication would break down.

Molecular biologist Irene Chen of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has further illuminated that delicate balance. Her work posits that, as an information storage system, DNA was less error-prone than RNA, its single-stranded molecular forerunner and the key material of the so-called RNA world thought to have preceded life as we now know it.

So, then, one can imagine, early in Earth’s history, life evolving again and again, crashing on the rocks of time and circumstance, until finally it hit upon just the right mutation rate—one that eons later would produce organisms and species and ecosystems that reproduce themselves and persist across time and chancellor.

That’s the remarkable thing about life: It continues. It keeps going and growing. Barring catastrophic asteroid strikes, or possibly the exponential population growth of a certain bipedal, big-brained hominid, life on Earth maintains complexity, actually increases it, even as the natural tendency of systems is to become simpler. Clocks unwind, suns run down, individual lives end, the Universe itself heads towards its own cold, motionless death; such is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, inviolable and inescapable.

Yet so long as Earth’s sun shines and genetic mutations arise, evolution may maintain its own thermodynamic law. Black-capped chickadees and willow tits diverge. Life pushes back. 

Footnote 
1. To be sure, the concept of neutrally driven biodiversity isn’t universally accepted. There may be subtle, intrinsic advantages to diversification. An example comes from the models of James O’Dwyer, a theoretical ecologist at the University of Illinois: Simply by virtue of their novelty, new species may be intrinsically less vulnerable to pathogens that afflicted their evolutionary parents.

So, then, perhaps willow tits and black-capped chickadees evolved slightly different feather patterns because they provided some immediate, direct benefit; or maybe it happened just because, for no reason at all, really; or maybe there was a subtle benefit intrinsic to the process of variation itself; or maybe it was some combination of all three, varying by time and place.

So, it’s complicated. But whatever the complications, all these processes share something very fundamental: the emergence of variety over time as life’s essential property.

Brandon Keim (@9brandon) is a freelance journalist specializing in science, environment, and culture.

The Visible Evolution of Cliff Swallows

From ScienceNOW, this is a cool explanation of how scientists are seeking evolution in action among Cliff Swallows. These birds tend to roost under bridges, which makes them prone to death by automobile. But over the last 30 years the number of roadkill birds has seriously declined. It turns out they have evolved shorter wing structures to make themselves more able to dodge cars. Nature rocks!

On the road. Since the advent of highways, cliff swallows have built nests that hang off bridges and tunnels, putting them in close proximity to traffic. Credit: Brown et al., Current Biology (2013)

Evolution via Roadkill

by Sarah C. P. Williams on 18 March 2013

Cliff swallows that build nests that dangle precariously from highway overpasses have a lower chance of becoming roadkill than in years past thanks to a shorter wingspan that lets them dodge oncoming traffic. That's the conclusion of a new study based on 3 decades of data collected on one population of the birds. The results suggest that shorter wingspan has been selected for over this time period because of the evolutionary pressure put on the population by cars.

"This is a clear example of how you can observe natural selection over short time periods," says ecologist Charles Brown of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, who conducted the new study with wife Mary Bomberger Brown, an ornithologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "Over 30 years, you can see these birds being selected for their ability to avoid cars."

The Browns have studied cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) in southwestern Nebraska since 1982. They return to the same roads every nesting season to perform detailed surveys of the colonies of thousands of birds that build mud nests on bridges and overpasses in the area. Along with studies on living swallows—counting birds and eggs, netting and banding individuals, and observing behaviors—the Browns also picked up swallow carcasses they found on the roads, in the hopes of having additional specimens to measure and preserve. They hadn't planned studies on roadkill numbers, but recently they began to get the sense that they were picking up fewer dead birds than in the past.

When the researchers looked back at the numbers of swallows collected as roadkill each year, they found that the count had steadily declined from 20 birds a season in 1984 and 1985 to less than five per season for each of the past 5 years. During that same time, the number of nests and birds had more than doubled, and the amount of traffic in the area had remained steady.

The birds that were being killed, further analysis revealed, weren't representative of the rest of the population. On average, they had longer wings. In 2012, for example, the average cliff swallow in the population had a 106-millimeter wingspan, whereas the average swallow killed on the road had a 112-millimeter wingspan.

"Probably the most important effect of a shorter wing is that it allows the birds to turn more quickly," says Charles Brown. Previous studies on the dynamics of flight have illustrated the benefits of short wings for birds that perform many pivots and rolls during flying and shown that shorter wings also may allow the birds to take off faster from the ground, he adds.

When the researchers analyzed the average wing length of the living birds in the population, they discovered that it had become shorter over time, from 111 millimeters in 1982 to the 106 millimeter average in 2012. The data suggested to the Browns that roadkill deaths were a major force driving this selection. Birds with longer wings would be more likely to be killed by vehicles and less likely to reproduce, the team reports online today inCurrent Biology.

The data illustrate a "beautiful trend that never could have been predicted," says evolutionary biologist John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, who was not involved in the study. "We humans, because we're changing the environment so much, are adding a new kind of natural selection to these animal populations."

Few studies have looked at long-term changes in roadkill numbers, Charles Brown says, so more work is needed to determine whether similar trends hold for swallows in other areas, for other types of birds, or for mammals. "I would think that this would be a pattern that certainly might apply to other species," he says. "But there's almost nothing in the literature on historical trends in roadkills, because surveys typically last a season or two, not an extended period of years."

The new findings could also apply to birds killed by wind turbines, Hoogland adds, and they illustrate the payoff that can come with careful data collection and observation. "I think the most important lesson from this research is the paramount importance of collecting data even when you're not sure what it means or how it could lead to findings in the future."

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Simon Winchester | "Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley's Curious Collection" Authors at Google

Strange, interesting, fascinating . . . . In this talk from Google, Simon Winchester talks about his newest book, completed with photographer Nick Mann, Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley's Curious Collection.

Simon Winchester | "Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley's Curious Collection" Authors at Google 

Published on Mar 4, 2013

Skulls is a beautiful spellbinding exploration of more than 300 different animal skulls­—amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles—written by New York Times bestselling author, Simon Winchester and produced in collaboration with Theodore Gray and Touch Press, the geniuses behind The Elements and Solar System. 

In Skulls, best-selling author Simon Winchester (author of The Professor and the Madman; Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean; Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded; and others) tells the rich and fascinating story of skulls, both human and animal, from every perspective imaginable: historical, biographical, cultural, and iconographic. Presenting details about the parts of the skull (including the cranium, the mandible, the shape and positioning of the eye sockets, and species-specific features like horns, teeth, beaks and bills), information about the science and pseudoscience of skulls, and a look at skulls in religion, art and popular culture, his stories and information are riveting and enlightening.

At the center of Skulls is a stunning, never-before-seen-in-any-capacity, visual array of the skulls of more than 300 animals that walk, swim, and fly. The skulls are from the collection of Alan Dudley, a British collector and owner of what is probably the largest and most complete private collection of skulls in the world. Every skull is beautifully photographed to show several angles and to give the reader the most intimate view possible. Each includes a short explanatory paragraph and a data box with information on the animal's taxonomy, behavior, and diet.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

A group of very prominent neuroscientists - including Jaak Panksepp, David Edelman, and Christof Koch, among others - have released a statement affirming that consciousness is not limited to those critters with a neocortex. Very cool - here is the statement.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness*

On this day of July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals. While comparative research on this topic is naturally hampered by the inability of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about their internal states, the following observations can be stated unequivocally:

• The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is  becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.

• The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviors in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems in humans can also generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and nonhuman animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).

• Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.

• In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in non-human animals with compounds known to affect conscious behavior in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behavior in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and nonhuman animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provide compelling evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.

We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

* The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch. The Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, by Low, Edelman and Koch. The Declaration was signed by the conference participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK. The signing ceremony was memorialized by CBS 60 Minutes.

John Marzluff - Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans

Amazon has a book review feature that I had kind of forgotten about, called Omnivoracious. An old friend from Seattle, who knows I love all things related to crows and ravens, sent me a link to the review of a new book by John Marzluff called, Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans. Martzluff is a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, which has one of the densest populations of crows on the planet.

Here is the brief review (which is actually a commentary by the author on why crows?):

Are Crows Smarter Than Us? John Marzluff Explains

by Neal Thompson on July 24, 2012

 

We’ve seen a few fun bird books this year, including Bird Sense: What It is Like to Be a Bird, a Best of the Month pick in April, and What The Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World.

Now comes John Marzluff's captivating Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans. Among other shockers I learned that crows (and their kin, ravens and jays) have huge brains and street smarts, they drink coffee and beer, they use tools and language, and they're even capable of murder.

So we asked the author, What’s the deal with crows? Are they, like, the smartest birds on the planet? Here's what Martzluff, a University of Washington professor, has to say.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here’s the deal with crows. They are basically flying monkeys. Their brains are as large as a monkey’s brain of their size would be; much larger than other birds. Remember the Wizard of Oz? That pack of flying primates that hunted Dorothy and her companions had nothing (stylish hats and coats aside) on the crows that roam your backyard. The monkeys seemed only to express the emotion of fear or anger, and were fully under the control of the Wicked Witch of the West. Heck in the movie they couldn’t even speak! Crows, on the other hand, always seem to express their free will. They can imitate human voice and often do so! In Montana, one crow was so adept at mimicking a master’s “Here Boy, Come Boy” that it could call dogs, and did so on many occasions. This talking crow even assembled a pack of mutts by flying from house to house and fooling dogs into thinking they were following their owner! With his pack in tow, the crow headed to the University of Montana campus, kept them at attention beneath a tree, and ran them through students as they walked between classrooms! For fun or to possibly dislodge a sandwich remains unknown, but certainly Oz’s monkeys couldn’t do that!

Crows are super smart because they have long lifespans, spend considerable portions of their lives with others in social groups, and learn quickly through trial and error and by observation. Their brains, like our own, allow crows to form lasting, emotionally charged memories. They dream and reconsider what they see and hear before acting (something we aren’t always so good at). They go through their lives much as we do—sensing, considering, forming a plan of action, and adjusting. They can recognize and remember individual people, for years. In Sweden, magpies (close relatives of crows) learned to ring a doorbell whenever they saw the lady of house because she occasionally fed them. Her husband never fed them and even attempted to shoo them away. In retaliation they crapped on his car windshield every morning. It’s a good thing monkeys can’t really fly.

But are crows the smartest birds on the planet? I wouldn’t go quite that far but certainly they are among the smartest. As with people, it is hard to develop a standardized test of intelligence with which to score and rank birds. If the test required making a tool, then the New Caledonia crow would win. If, on the other hand, the test required the creation of a new word, then the African Gray Parrot would likely win. We humans are today administering perhaps the toughest test ever on those with whom we share Earth. Our rapid transformation of land, cooption of resources, and change of climate challenges all plants and animals. To this test, again the crow is well suited. Their large and complex brains allow crows to innovate, intuit, and quickly associate reward and punishment with action. Through this complex cognition they are able to solve whatever humanity throws their way: they adapt to new foods, new lands, new resources, and likely a new climate. So, if the test includes the question “can you live with people?” then crows by their wonderful adaptability will come out at the head of the class.
--John Marzluff

(The illustration on the right--in which a crow rounds up a pack of dogs--is by Tony Angell, whose drawings and diagrams of mischievous and playful crows appear throughout Gifts of the Crow, a perfect complement to Marzluff's lively storytelling.)

The Amazing Intelligence of Ravens and Crows

Here are a couple of posts from the last month on the amazing intelligence of ravens - for newer readers, I have been fascinated by the whole corvid family, but especially crows and ravens, for a couple of decades at least. I tend to post whatever new research comes out about their intelligence and culture.

First from io9:

 

Ravens like to communicate with their beaks — but not how you imagine

By Robert T. Gonzalez

Nov 29, 2011

Before most of us could talk, we were communicating with gestures — holding, pointing and reaching at objects, for example, to communicate our wants and needs to others.

These referential gestures (known as deictic gestures to those in the know) are thought to play an important foundational role in the development of higher forms of communication like speech, and are believed to be relatively rare in the animal kingdom. But now, scientists have found the first evidence that ravens, widely recognized as some of nature's smartest birds, use deictic gestures too — a discovery that researchers say could help shed light on the mysterious origins of human language.

Until recently, deictic gestures had only been observed in humans and a few of our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees — who have been observed signaling to other chimps where on their bodies they would like to be groomed. But according to researchers Simone Pika and Thomas Bugnyar (experts in gestural communication and raven behavior, respectively), virtually nothing is known about comparable skills in non-primate species.

In the interest of filling this investigative gap, Pika and Bugnyar spent two years observing the social interactions of seven pairs of ravens to determine if the birds engaged in referential gestures similar to those seen in humans. They discovered that ravens will use their beaks to present their counterparts with moss, stones and twigs; that these gestures are typically directed towards ravens of the opposite sex; and that they are only performed when another bird is watching.

In the latest issue of Nature Communications, Pika and Bugnyar conclude that these gestures may function as "testing-signals," allowing a raven to evaluate the interest of a potential partner, or to reinforce the strength of an already existing bond.

"If communication is governed by cooperation, then this could be what prompted the evolution of language [in both humans and ravens]" explains Pika. She continues:

Gesture studies have too long focused on communicative skills of primates only. The mystery of the origins of human language, however, can only be solved if we look at the bigger picture and also consider the complexity of the communication systems of other animal groups.

[Nature Communications via New Scientist]
Top image by cowlishaw

And this is from Inkfish, a blog from the editor of MUSE, a very cool kids' science magazine.

Aesop's Crows Understand Physics, Literature

By Elizabeth Preston on Friday, December 16, 2011

 

Aesop told the fable of a thirsty crow that came upon a nearly empty pitcher of water and discovered that by dropping pebbles in, he could raise the water to a drinkable level. The moral is "Little by little does the trick"--or was that "Necessity is the mother of invention"? Either way, scientists have enjoyed testing non-fictional members of the clever corvid family with this puzzle. Most recently, wild crows showed scientists they're smart enough for a whole barrage of Aesop-inspired challenges.

New Zealand psychologist Alex Taylor led the study of five New Caledonian crows that had been captured from the wild. The birds (Caesar, Laura, Bess, Mimic and Pepe, since you asked) were each given an extensive series of tests while visually separated from their peers. Like one of those computer games where you walk into a dead-end room and have to find the secret button that opens a submarine hatch and takes you someplace more interesting, the crows were presented with varied apparatuses and had to figure out which objects were tools that would help get a tasty treat into their beaks.

The tests began with the classic "Aesop's fable paradigm." Crows saw a tube partially filled with water. Inside the tube was a bite of meat, stuck onto a piece of wood that floated below their reach. Small stones were sitting nearby. If you're thinking that you might not have been able to solve this puzzle, rest assured--the birds didn't get it either.

After making sure the crows didn't naturally know how to solve the puzzle, the researchers gave the birds a hint. This time, the crows saw the same tube, floating meat, and stones. But there was a platform next to the top of the tube with a couple stones sitting on it, too. As the crows attempted to jam their beaks far enough into the tube to reach the meat, they tended to accidentally knock the stones into the tube. After doing this several times and noticing how the water level rose, all the crows eventually figured out the trick. They began dropping stones into the tube on purpose to get the meat.

Although this looks pretty clever, it's possible that the birds found the solution by simple association: "Stones mean food. Mess around with the stones, or put them near the food, and the food gets in my beak." So the researchers followed up with a series of puzzles that tested what the crows actually understood.

(Only four crows were used in most of the experiments--poor Bess, perhaps believing herself to be in one of those fables where the crow gets eaten by an alligator, was too afraid of the testing apparatus to participate.)

In one test, the crows were given stones of two different sizes. They quickly began ignoring the smaller stones in favor of larger ones, which raised the water level faster. (Laura, the smartypants of the bunch, never once used a small stone.) In another test, the stones were replaced with white chunks of rubber and styrofoam. Though they looked the same, the former item was heavy and useful, while the latter uselessly floated on top of the water. Again, the crows picked up on the difference, learning after a few trials to discard the styrofoam chunks and throw the rubber ones into the tube. In this video, you can see Mimic mastering the puzzle on his first try (and adorably peeking into the tube to make sure the meat is still there).

The crows seemed to understand what was important about the objects they were using as tools: bigger and heavier items would get the meat to them faster. But did they grasp what was happening inside the tube? To test the birds' understanding of the water in the tube, researchers showed them a tube of water next to a tube of sand. Both had the usual chunk of meat sitting on their surface, but throwing rocks into the tube of sand would accomplish nothing. The crows soon learned this, more or less, and dropped most of their rocks into the water tube. In this video, smartypants Laura ignores the sand tube entirely in her fourth trial. When the tube of water was paired with a tube of air, the crows again learned to put most of their stones into the water tube--though they dropped a fair number of stones into the air tube as well, apparently struggling to grasp that one clear substance wasn't the same as the other.

New Caledonian crows use sticks as tools in the wild to dig grubs out of holes, and showed here that they can learn to use other kinds of tools as well. This suggests that using tools, for the crows, is true problem solving and not just an ingrained behavior (like your dog kicking up imaginary dirt on the sidewalk after it poops). And the birds' performance with different sizes and shapes of "rocks" shows that they can adapt their tool use to various conditions--though they did struggle a bit with the tubes of air and sand. Buoyancy is tricky for everyone.

With the crow-and-pitcher paradigm nearly exhausted, maybe scientists will turn to Aesop's other fables for future studies. Are crows susceptible to flattery when holding pieces of cheese? Do foxes eat grapes (sour or otherwise)? And, of course, does slow and steady really win the race?

Images: Project Gutenberg/Wikimedia Commons; Taylor et al. (video screengrab)

Taylor, A., Elliffe, D., Hunt, G., Emery, N., Clayton, N., & Gray, R. (2011). New Caledonian Crows Learn the Functional Properties of Novel Tool Types PLoS ONE, 6 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026887

More Evidence of Raven Intelligence - Finding Lost Hikers

Long-time readers of this blog - and those who know me well - know that I am HUGE fan or corvids, especially crows and ravens. I loved living in Seattle because it has the densest population of crows of any American city. Weirdly, Tucson has no crows, but we do have ravens, the bigger and smarter relative of crows.

This is a cool article that demonstrates just how smart ravens are - and what they can be trained to do. This comes from Mother Nature Network.

A common raven may be uncommon way to find lost hikers

Expert trains her pet raven to find lost objects with uncannily accurate results.

By Katherine Butler
Thu, Sep 02 2010

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Ravens are known for their jarring “squawk” and a role as Edgar Allen Poe’s diabolical foe, not to mention they're frequent use in pop culture imagery. But NPR reports on another raven that may prove to be more savior than foe. Shade is the pet raven of doctoral student Emily Cory. When Shade showed signs of extreme intelligence, Cory decided to train the bird in the art of hide-and-seek in hopes of assisting search and rescue teams. What Cory learned was that Shade has an uncanny knack for memory, language and even game skills.

Ravens are extremely resourceful and wily in terms of finding foods for their omnivorous diets. Their brains are among the largest of birds, and they have a keen grasp of problem solving, imitation and insight. They have even been known to multitask. Ravens have also been known to get other animals to work for them, such as calling wolves to the scene of a carcass to rip up the meat and make it more accessible to the birds. Their corvid cousins, crows, have also been seen dropping nuts onto freeways, allowing cars to drive over them. Once the nuts are crushed, the birds swoop in and grab the meats.

Cory grew up in the canyons of Sedona, Ariz., often listening to helicopters flying over, searching for lost hikers. As an adult, Cory worked with birds at the Arizona-Sonora Museum. A common raven caught her attention. As Cory tells NPR, "She'd [the raven] play horrible tricks on the volunteers, she'd get in so much trouble. She never forgot a thing, never missed a thing [and] that really got my attention."

This prompted Cory to consider training a raven to seek out lost hikers like the ones so common in her childhood. She purchased Shade and began to train her in elaborate games of hide-and-seek, all the while writing her master’s thesis on the project. Shade showed an uncanny knack for finding anything Cory hid from her — even looking in places Cory never thought to hide objects. She even noticed that Shade understood verbal commands. As Cory tells it, "Sometimes she [Shade] responds correctly even when my back is to her. For example, she loves Chapstick. She always steals Chapstick." Cory notes that if Shade even hears the word “Chapstick,” she will immediately fly off and find it.

Cory hopes to train Shade to work in the back country, flying back and forth between hiker and trainer with a GPS attached to her foot. But her attempts have hit a roadblock, as no colleagues or professors will support her research. Nonetheless, Cory is undeterred. She recently started a Ph.D. program at the University of Arizona focusing on ravens and language.

This isn't the first time scientists have successfully taught crows and ravens to accomplish tasks. A tech expert built a crow vending machine which allows the birds to deposit spare change for various items.

A team of researchers from the University of Washington studied the ability of crows and ravens to facially recognize certain human beings. Those researchers wore rubber caveman masks while capturing and tagging wild American crows. When a person wearing the caveman mask approached the crows later, the birds attacked, or “scolded” them loudly. If the same person approached the birds wearing a mask of former Vice President Dick Cheney — whom they had not seen before — the birds didn’t bat an eye.

For further reading:

• Someday, this raven may fly to the rescue

Tags: ravens, intelligence, birds, Mother Nature Network, Katherine Butler, Emily Cory, Shade, play, memory, language, game skills, corvids

When the Going Gets Tough, Lazy Crows Get Going

Very cool article on crows from Nature - and the laziest birds stepped up the most. Hmmm . . . I wonder if we can get the crows to teach humans how to do this.

Lazy crows pitch in when it counts

Hard times bring out the best in idle birds.

Janelle Weaver

Lazy crows step up to fill the breach left by handicapped birds.V. Baglione

Freeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows.

Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding and caring for the young. Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all. Puzzled about the reasons for this leniency, scientists have suggested that dominants may indirectly benefit from the survival and future reproduction of lazy relatives, and that larger groups — even those filled with dallying birds — may have a lower risk of predation or be more efficient at foraging.

Evolutionary biologist Vittorio Baglione at the University of Valladolid in Palencia, Spain, and colleagues now reveal an unexpected role for the laziest members of the group. They report their findings today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences¹.

The research team used camouflaged video cameras to collect data on how often 61 wild crows from 17 social groups in northern Spain fed chicks. They recorded for 12 hours across three days, then trapped and clipped the wings of one breeding bird from each group and repeated the data collection. When clipped crows reduced their chick feeding by about 30%, only non-breeders intensified their care-giving efforts. What's more, the laziest birds increased their helping behaviour the most. Five out of eight crows that had previously refused to visit the nest suddenly began feeding the chicks.

Group insurance

"It's really important to investigate individual variability in helping behaviour, because it could help us understand the evolution of cooperation," says Walt Koenig, an ornithologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "That's the central dilemma of behavioural ecology that we've been grappling with for a long time."

Loitering crows may help the whole group by ensuring that provisions for offspring remain constant during tough times: the increased effort of non-breeders compensated fully for the diminished offerings of the disabled crows. What's not clear is whether the slackers offer the help because they hear chicks begging or because dominant birds force them to contribute. Dawdling animals may be more likely to chip in voluntarily if they are strongly related to other members of the group, because they may derive indirect gains from the group's overall reproductive success.

The factors that influence helping behaviour are difficult to examine using skittish crows in the wild, so Baglione next plans to use tame birds in aviaries. There's still a lot more to learn about how different individuals adjust their cooperative behaviour depending on the actions of others in the group, he says. "I'd like to believe that this kind of study might shed some light on cooperation in humans and other species that cooperate in subtle ways."

• References

  1. Baglione, V. et al. Proc. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.0745

Tags: Janelle Weaver, Nature, Lazy crows pitch in when it counts, Psychology, birds, crows, helping behavior, handicapped crows, Vittorio Baglione, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, evolution of cooperation

Magpies 'feel grief and hold funerals'

Another reason corvids are way awesome, and maybe as "civilized" as we are.

Magpies 'feel grief and hold funerals'

Magpies feel grief and even hold funeral-type gatherings for their fallen friends and lay grass "wreaths" beside their bodies, an animal behaviour expert has claimed.

Published: 7:00AM BST 21 Oct 2009

A magpie Photo: GETTY

Dr Bekoff, of the University of Colorado, said these rituals prove that magpies, usually seen as an aggressive predator, also have a compassionate side.

The discovery raises the debate about whether emotions are solely a human trait or whether they can be found in all animals.

Previous studies have suggested that gorillas also mourn their dead while rats have empathy and cats form friendships.

Dr Bekoff said he studied four magpies alongside a magpie corpse and recorded their behaviour.

"One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it, just as an elephant would nose the carcase of another elephant, and stepped back. Another magpie did the same thing, " he said.

"Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then all four stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off."

After publishing an account of the funeral he received emails from people who had seen the same ritual in magpies, ravens and crows.

"We can't know what they were actually thinking or feeling, but reading their action there's no reason not to believe these birds were saying a magpie farewell to their friend," he wrote in the journal Emotion, Space and Society.

Those who see emotions in animals have been accused of anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to animals.

However, Dr Bekoff said emotions evolved in humans and animals because they improve the chances of survival.

"It's bad biology to argue against the existence of animal emotions," he said.

He also claims to have seen emotions in elephants. While watching a herd in Kenya he noticed an injured cow elephant who was only able to walk slowly.

"Despite her disability the rest of the herd walked for a while, stopped to look around and then waited for her to catch up.

"The only obvious conclusion we could see is the other elephants cared and so they adjusted their behaviour," said Dr Bekoff.

Tags: Magpies 'feel grief and hold funerals', corvids, Dr Bekoff, birds, grief, death

Wired - Culture May Be Encoded in DNA

Great article from Wired - there may be evidence of DNA-encoded culture, which might change our understanding of genetics. Granted, this is a study of songbirds, but DNA acts remarkably in the same way across species.

Culture May Be Encoded in DNA

• By Lizzie Buchen
• May 3, 2009
  

Knowledge is passed down directly from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way.

Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations.

“We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome,” said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of a study in Nature on Sunday.

Birds transmit their songs through social interactions, as humans do for languages, dances, cuisine and other cultural elements. Though birds and humans have clearly followed different evolutionary paths, birdsong culture can still inform theories of human culture.

Normally, male finches learn their complex courtship songs (MP3) from their uncles and fathers. But if there are no vocal role models around, the song will deviate from the traditional song and be harsh to female finch ears (MP3). Each bird, then, must learn from his father or uncles, as they learned from their fathers, and so on — but this can only take us so far down the lineage.

“It’s the classic ‘chicken and the egg’ puzzle,” Mitra said. “Learning may explain how the son copies its father’s song, but it doesn’t explain the origin of the father’s song.”

Mitra’s team wanted to find out what would happen if an isolated bird raised his own colony. As expected, birds raised in soundproof boxes grew up to sing cacophonous songs.

But then scientists let the isolated birds give voice lessons to a new round of hatchlings. They found that the young males imitated the songs — but they tweaked them slightly, bringing the structure closer to that of songs sung in the wild. When these birds grew up and became tutors, their pupils’ song continue to conform, with tweaks.

After three to four generations, the teachers were producing strapping young finches that belted out normal-sounding songs.

You can listen to the progression below, but keep in mind that the elements that are important to female finches — duration of beats, rise and fall of pitch — can be difficult for the untrained human ear to pick up on. (QuickTime works best for these)

• birds raised in isolation (MP3)
• first generation (MP3)
• second generation (MP3)
• third generation (MP3)
• fourth generation (MP3)
• wild birds (MP3, MP3)

“It all happened so fast, and there was so little difference between the colony and in the one-to-one tutoring environment,” said lead author Olga Fehér of City College of New York. “So the process is pretty much hardwired. And the interesting thing was also that they could only get so close in a single generation, so the three to four generations were necessary for the phenotype to emerge.”

“Song culture can emerge ‘from the egg,’ as it were, if one allows for multiple generations to elapse,” Mitra said. ”In a similar way, we may ‘grow’ our languages.”

Though there are approximately 6,000 different languages in the world, they all share certain structural and syntactic elements. Even when a language arises spontaneously, as it did in the 1970s among deaf school children in Nicaragua, it adheres to these stereotypical human language features.

The study’s findings might have implications beyond language to other culturally-transmitted systems, said evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch, at the University of St. Andrews.

“We can think about both birdsong and human culture — especially language but including other aspects of human culture, like music, cuisine, dance styles, rituals, technological achievements, clothing styles, pottery decoration and a host of others — in similar terms,” he said. These culturally-transmitted systems must all pass through the filter of biology.

“Look at all the different human cultures,” said Mitra. “They’re different, but they’re all within certain constraints, so those differences aren’t genetic. But now compare with the chimp culture — there are key differences. The possibilities between those cultures are constrained by biology.”

Mitra admits that the analogies between bird culture and human culture are tenuous. “But there are resemblances. Culture is just learned behaviors. The motivating scenario is, if you isolate human babies from culture, put them on an island and come back after a few generations, what would their culture be like? What sort of language would they have? What sort of politics would evolve?”

That experiment probably won’t take place in the near future. In the meantime, Fitch says we can learn valuable lessons about human culture from songbirds, both at theoretical and mechanistic levels.

“Social learning is shared between the two, and songbirds are a well-understood and experimentally tractable system,” he said. “These biologically-grounded studies will lead us beyond the tired ‘nature versus nurture’ or ‘biology versus culture’ dichotomies which dominate the social sciences today.”

See Also:

• Don’t Knock the Birdbrains
• Math Smarts: Nurture Not Nature
• Whew! Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny

Citation: Olga Fehér, Haibin Wang, Sigal Saar, Partha P. Mitra & Ofer Tchernichovski. “De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch.” Nature, published online ahead of print May 3, 2009.

Image: Flickr/NeilsPhotography

Tags: genetics, culture, biology, birds, Wired, Culture May Be Encoded in DNA, Lizzie Buchen, Zebra finches, Partha Mitra, Nature

Gratitude 12/23/07 - The View from My Deck

I spent a lot of time this weekend sitting at my computer working on a writing assignment (for which I am grateful). In order to avoid getting stiff, I went out on my deck from time to time to watch the birds that live around here. So I took a few pictures.

This first one is actually the sunrise Friday morning. The color only lasted a few minutes, so I feel lucky to have gotten a picture.


This little guy is a Ruby-throated hummingbird, and it's a male, as you can tell by the color (females lack the bright red throat and green back).

Here's another view where you can see more of the coloring on the throat. Their coloring changes depending on how the light hits their feathers.

For those who don't know much about hummingbirds, these little creatures are mean. This guy sits most of the day on this plant, guarding the feeder on my deck and the one on my neighbor's. Most of his energy is used chasing away any other hummingbird that gets near. He'll chase them as far away as possible, before resuming his post.

This next little guy is a Silver cardinal. He looks much like the female of the standard Cardinal (where only the male is fully red). And like Cardinals, Silver cardinals are nearly always found in mating pairs. On this particular day, I didn't see the female. But there was a good reason for that, as you'll see in the next photo.

A rare visitor, this Peregrine falcon was likely hoping for a nice juicy rabbit for dinner. But as soon as he was anywhere near the area, everything scattered and hid, aside from a few smaller birds (Cactus wrens, the Silver cardinal, and of course the hummingbirds).


These are just a few of the birds that I get to see on a regular basis. I hope to get some more pictures in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, I am very grateful to have a piece of wild desert right outside my apartment.

Tags: gratitude, Nature, birds, Photography, Ruby-throated hummingbird, Silver cardinal, Peregrine falcon

Bird Photos

Lots and lots of cool bird photos -- all of Australian birds as far as I can tell -- at BirdPhotos.com. Here are just a few -- each photo at the site identifies the bird and the location.

Tags: Nature, Photography, birds, Australia