10 ms·
Bird brains (2023)
- riverforest 6mo ago[flagged]
- Bender 6mo agoAdding to this a chart of neuron count [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#Forebrain_(cerebrum_or_pallium)_only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
- pcthrowaway 6mo agoInteresting... I would have thought Octopi have more total neurons than dogs, given their problem-solving capabilities. Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving
- yieldcrv 6mo agoThe prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence” And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary octopi bucking that trend is an example we need
- tokai 6mo agoNo its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.
- yieldcrv 6mo agoI’d be interested in crafting a more neural optimal, less resource intensive human
- Nevermark 6mo agoSomething interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny. It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate. This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations. No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence. -- Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too. We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage. -- For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations. To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments. It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging. The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again. (We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.) -- There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
- DiffTheEnder 6mo agoThe zero parenting thing is what gets me. Pretty much every other animal we'd call intelligent leans hard on social learning -- crows, primates, parrots all spend ages learning from adults. Octopuses hatch alone, figure everything out solo in 1-2 years, and then die. That's the wild part. If they had even a 5 year lifespan with overlapping generations, honestly no idea where the ceiling would be. Maybe the octopi in captivity could be taught to parent and produce genius octopi?
- jrrv 6mo agoFun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.
- bdamm 6mo agoThat's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii. It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
- psychoslave 6mo agoThey are all already in use https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus
- 6510 6mo agooctopurs
- gnubison 6mo agoPronounced octópodes, /ɒkˈtɒpədiːz/, with the -es rhyming with Heracles etc.
- PurpleRamen 6mo agoNeurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard. And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
- ordu 6mo ago> reacting faster in general than an Octopus It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope. Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
- psychoslave 6mo agoThis code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product! "Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters. [1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-vinci-simplicity-ultimate-sophistication/ https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...
- sva_ 6mo agoYeah their nerve cells are much larger. The axons of a giant squid are up to a millimeter in width.
- fusslo 6mo agoI wonder how they count neurons, 11 billion is a lot of counting.
- Bender 6mo agoI too was curious so I searched and found "using a technique called the isotropic fractionator (or "brain soup" method) which involves dissolving brain tissue and creating a homogeneous mixture of nuclei to allow for accurate sampling and estimation."
- cyjackx 6mo agoI have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
- rf15 6mo agoBut we and dinosaurs share a descendant that already had neurons/a brain?
- argsnd 6mo agoWhatever humans are descended from existed during the time of the dinosaurs
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoIf you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.
- eigenspace 6mo agoAll living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
- vlovich123 6mo agoSure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt. This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
- eigenspace 6mo agoMost of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds. > This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe. There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement. I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
- small_model 6mo agoGiven parrots can talk, there must be a neuron count that activates language (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.
- jayers 6mo agoThat seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.
- vablings 6mo agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02855-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02855-9 Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication. If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
- pegasus 6mo agoOne thing I've learned by following a link from elsewhere in this thread is that while the total count of neurons in an animal's nervous system is not a good proxy for intelligence, the count of neurons in the forebrain is. By that measure, only the orca ranks higher than humans [1]. That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#Forebrain_(cerebrum_or_pallium)_only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
- Zambyte 6mo agoLanguage also has a lot to do with what we do. We do more complex things than animals, so we say more complex things than animals. The biggest difference in the evolution of human language versus the evolution of elephant language might just be that we have thumbs.
- ge96 6mo agoIf you haven't seen Apollo on YT, crazy What is it made out of? meTUL Want a pistach
- frou_dh 6mo agoHe's so charming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8-ZmuJixIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8-ZmuJixIg
- gjsman-1000 6mo ago> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off. The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
- DiffTheEnder 6mo agoAh yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
- gjsman-1000 6mo agoThen to put it bluntly; you lied to your audience. > "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off." If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.
- DiffTheEnder 6mo agoThanks that’s fair critique. And apologise for the half truth there.
- mock-possum 6mo agoiirc there’s a similar mythos around coco the gorilla
- lucasay 6mo ago“More neurons = intelligence” always felt like an oversimplification. If that were true, we wouldn’t be surprised by birds or octopuses anymore.
- IshKebab 6mo agoIt's not a 1:1 relationship but they are related.
- djmips 6mo agobird brains are a die shrink of mammalian brains.
- tos1 6mo agoThis gives a whole new meaning to the term “stochastic parrots” for LLMs :)
- SoftTalker 6mo ago> Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment. Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
- forinti 6mo agoOne fact that I find very curious is that I see all sorts of animals killed on the road, but never chickens. And I see plenty of them by the road. Maybe they never try to cross roads?
- SoftTalker 6mo ago"Chicken" is also an idiomatic synonym for "frightens easily." They do have some instinct for avoiding danger.
- forinti 6mo agoRoosters can be very aggresive.
- DroneBetter 6mo agoor perhaps it's an artefact of them having a higher contrast against the asphalt and being somewhat fat and puffy compared to most roadkill animals
- Broken_Hippo 6mo agoThey definitely cross roads. In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom. That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.
- unzadunza 6mo agoChickens are not dumb, check out: https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/
- builderhq_io 6mo ago[dead]
- junon 6mo agoParrot owner here. This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm actually a bit surprised they cared about the gyms! This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology: https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_library/behaviour_and_environmental_enrichment/The%20ABCs%20of%20Behaviour.pdf https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...
- amelius 6mo agoReminds me of: https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.html https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.h... > Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.
- awinter-py 6mo agois this a straight-up advantage, or is the trade-off lower connectivity?
- Sharlin 6mo agoMakes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
- aidenn0 6mo agoI've not spent significant time with border collies, but I'd say that if I had to rank, multiple species of corvids are smarter than german shepherds (a breed I'm more familiar with).
- gbgarbeb 6mo agoMost people don't know it, but birds actually are optimizing against rotational inertia far more than they're optimizing for mass. Otherwise they would barely be able to eat or drink; their stomachs are far larger and can be far heavier than their brains. Why would inertia need to be optimized? Think a little bit.
- 05 6mo agoI don’t even know how you’d compare their intelligence, it’s so apples to oranges.. Most birds build nests so they have an advantage in tool use and that’s what gets them ahead in some tests. On the other hand, have anyone tried to train corvids to herd other birds/animals? I bet BCs will have an advantage there:)
- Sharlin 6mo agoI'm not trying to compare them, just noting an interesting thing in the diagram in the article :) Wrt BC cognition, one notable feat is that some of them are known to have learned the words for hundreds of different objects.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- awsanswers 6mo agoIf you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.
- justonceokay 6mo agoI feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home
- deaddodo 6mo agoA decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out. Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel. That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
- justonceokay 6mo agoIf you’ve ever had a cat that is adamant about trying to escape you might feel differently.
- appletrotter 6mo ago> That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
- kjkjadksj 6mo ago
- bwv848 6mo agoBeen to NZ once. Keas are indeed the coolest parrots ever. Climb to the top of Avalanche Peak and you’re guaranteed to see some soaring in the sky, with snowy Mt. Rolleston in the background. Kiwis call them alpine parrots, but they are not. They were common on both islands before Polynesian/Maori hunted many of them, and European ranchers forced them to retreat to high beech forests and alpine zones. Another place is Dart Hut, I even found some kea feathers there.
- Supercompressor 6mo agoKiwi here. They live in alpine regions, they have adapted to alpine life - how are they not alpine parrots? Go back far enough and you could make this argument about anything.
- bwv848 6mo agoSure man, if 700 years is far enough for you. Meanwhile, human spent thousands of years to domesticate junglefowl into chicken.
- Supercompressor 6mo agoDomestication ≠ habitat classification. Alpine refers to habitat. Kea live, feed, and breed in alpine environments and are behaviourally adapted to it. By your logic, because my ancestors ~300 years ago aren’t from New Zealand, I’m not a New Zealander.
- bwv848 6mo agoSure man, ask the Keas, I am sure they like their new name and wouldn't prefer to live in lowland if human were to disappear in NZ.
- Supercompressor 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lateforwork 6mo agoThis is Alex the parrot, mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldYkFdu5FJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldYkFdu5FJk
- netcan 6mo agoParrots are definitely smart, but birds generally pack a lot into a small mass. That's required for flight.
- pks016 6mo agoI work on some aspects of intelligence in birds, primarily in songbirds. There have been some effort finding general intelligence ("g" cognitive factor) in birds since last 15-20 years. The results have been mixed as you would expect. Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard. Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.
- ninalanyon 6mo ago> Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival What do you mean by this? Surely this applies to humans too, we are animals after all. So what distinction did you intend to make?
- pks016 6mo agoI mean regarding the domains of intelligence and how to test them. With humans, performance in one cognitive test correlates with another and so on, generally. So, intelligence across domains. Researchers test the same with animals. The issue being animals' intelligence being tied to their ecology. The dilemma being what is it worth for an animal solving a task that has no significance in its life. The other argument being if the animals' intelligence is closer/similar to human intelligence, we will find similar results in both.
- robotpepi 6mo ago> Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard. My conure is extremely intelligent at times, learning a trick at the second try or doing what I ask him immediately. Most of the time, though, he understands but decides to just ignore me.
- pks016 6mo agoRelatable. Motivation is crucial for any task and most of time they are not motivated to do what you want.
- bradley13 6mo agoBirds are highly optimized. For example, all cells contain a full genome. The genomes in birds are a lot smaller - less trash DNA - which saves them weight and generally makes the cells more efficient.
- DiffTheEnder 6mo agoThis is interesting because I wonder if it compounds. Smaller genome, smaller cells, more neurons in the same volume... and now those neurons are individually more efficient too. The density numbers already seemed hard to explain just from spatial optimisation -- this might be the missing piece? Wonder what research exists here
- srean 6mo agohttps://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510 https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510 One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots. Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before. "You be good". Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.
- kridsdale1 6mo agoI’m not sure if you used “Classic Google” or not, but I put the quoted quote in to Google AI Mode (disclaimer; I am one of its developers) and got a full description of the story with links to online hostings of the full text in under 1 second. Not the same URL as your result, and I don’t know the IP validity of the hosting result pages I got, though. I recalled (once I was reminded of the author) that I read this originally in one of his Anthologies. I strongly recommend to everyone who likes reading and thinking to buy both of his books!
- srean 6mo agoI got some of those links and links to the summary of the story. But I did not want a summary (why massacre such a beautiful story *), and neither the later links (pretty bad visual presentation of the story), but the Nautilus link in particular. I think that's where I had read it first on the web, by far the best layout compared to the other links. Even a few years ago the Nautilus link used to be the canonical (first) result. * If I want Michelangelo's David summarised, I think I would mention 'summary' explicitly.
- ticulatedspline 6mo agoMakes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability. I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.
- data-ottawa 6mo agoIt’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal. There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase. I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoTo be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.
- data-ottawa 6mo agoYou’re right on that. They’ll have heard noises, experienced gyroscopic forces and gravity. But a calf being born and standing up within minutes to an hour is pretty neat. Same with vision, going from no sensory input to seeing. Apparently piglets have full motor control in 8 hours after birth. As I said, I would love to have the time and go back to school to learn way more about all of this. Nature and evolution are pretty amazing.
- api 6mo agoBirds are evolutionarily optimized for low mass.
- roywiggins 6mo agoIt makes you wonder how smart their ancestors- dinosaurs- were.
- culi 6mo agoIt seems like animals that have to memorize a really wide variety of plants, fruit, flowers, etc tend to have complex and dense brains
- Night_Thastus 6mo agoWorth nothing that the "mirror test" may not be accurate for a lot of animals - like dogs. Dogs are a lot more sensitive to smell, and can pass smell-based mirror-test-equivalents.
- mrec 6mo agoMaybe also worth noting some evidence that ants can apparently pass the mirror test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects When it first came out I don't think anyone quite knew what to make of that, and I'm not sure anything's changed since.
- bitwize 6mo agoI think that dogs and cats fail the mirror test not because they are unintelligent or lack a "sense of self", but because their sense of self is tied up with their sense of smell. Mirror reflections don't smell like themselves, so they don't recognize the reflection as themselves. They might recognize the reflection as a strange dog or cat, which may provoke aggression.
- picafrost 6mo agoI love watching magpies. I have seen them tease cats by "foraging" just out of sprint and leap distance. They quickly fly up to a tree when the cat moves, always keeping an eye on it, and resume when the cat resets, as other magpies in the group watch from above. I've seen them harass a hawk try to eat a fresh hunt, six magpies surrounding it, taking turns pecking at the hawk's tail until it leaves. They have interesting interactions with the hooded crows, tolerant of each other but still competitive over food. If a white tailed eagle enters they area they will together team up and attempt to chase it away. They have complex social interactions with each. I've seen a younger magpie in a group get pinned down by a dominant one while several in the group pecked at its belly, because it ate out of order. They acknowledge even me, their neighbor, who occasionally leaves some winter food out for them. Anyone who is fortunate to spend real time in or at the edge of nature, and takes the time to observe, should be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of the world around us. Some species stand out, of course, like the magpies. Most of what we have created as the human race is best characterized as complication rather than complexity, when compared to the utter complexity of the natural world. In the era of AI I find it amusing that we believe we're approaching being able to construct a kind of real intelligence when so many can barely recognize, let alone understand, the "lesser" forms of intelligence around us.
- functional_dev 6mo agoBTW magpies have passed the mirror test
- Animats 6mo agoIntelligence seems to have evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, octopuses, and corvids. These are different branches of the evolutionary tree, and the brain architectures are quite different. Octopuses have a distributed system. Corvids get more done with less brain volume and power than mammals.
- Supercompressor 6mo agoIf you'd like to read a long-form version of this, take a look at Jennifer Ackerman's "The Bird Way" from 2020. Really loved this book. https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/the-bird-way https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/the-bird-way Also, just my opinion, but Kea's are the best bird there is.
- anotherevan 6mo agoThe Australian sulfur-crested cockatoos are pretty smart. They would teach each other how to open heavy bin lids to raid the garbage. I seem to remember they would even team up to do it. There are studies about how this behaviour spread from suburb to suburb in Sydney.[1] More recently they've figured out how to operate drinking fountains.[2][3] [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cockatoos-learn-open-garbage-bins-observing-their-peers-180978248/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cockatoos-lear... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-06-04/sydney-sulphur-crested-cockatoo-using-bubblers/105365658 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-06-04/sydney-sulphu... [3] https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2025/06/wild-cockatoos-learn-to-drink-from-water-fountain/ https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2025...
- bloomingeek 6mo agoBefore our first trip to New Zealand, March of 2001, we did a lot of research because the plan was to drive up the South Island from the southern tip to the northern, then ferry across to the North Island. We consulted three different Travel books and they all said to be sure to get the rental car insurance and specifically mentioned the Keas. Sure enough, when we pulled over to a scenic pull over where other cars were, on the way to Milford Sound, there were a couple of Keas attacking a car windshied rubber gasket. I shooed them away, only to see them return. They are really beautiful, mischievous creatures.
- mkl 6mo agoKea also make and use tools, e.g. to set off stoat traps to get the bait: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/366747/clever-kea-using-tools-to-raid-traps https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/366747/clever-kea-using-..., https://twig.technology/blog/alpine-kea-trap-tampering https://twig.technology/blog/alpine-kea-trap-tampering
- florapreston672 6mo ago[dead]
- thelastgallon 6mo ago> A macaw's brain weighs 20 grams and has roughly the same number of forebrain neurons as a macaque monkey's brain at 70 grams. Ounce for ounce, bird brains are some of the most computationally dense organs in the animal kingdom.