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Cities have a lot to offer: theater, music, restaurants, birds. Yes, birds. But city birds are not like other birds. Because big cities are inhabited by birds with big brains. That’s according to a study in the journal Biology Letters. [Alexei Maklakov et al., "Brains and the city: big-brained passerine birds succeed in urban environments"]
It can take smarts to survive in the big city. Especially for birds. The urban environment is very different from the one in which their ancestors were born and fledged. But do city birds really need more gray matter to make it?
Scientists surveyed 82 species of passerine birds, including sparrows and anything that perches, in and around 12 cities in central Europe.* They classified the birds as those that breed in the heart of the city or those that avoid the hustle and bustle. And then they compared the bird brains.
The results? Birds that prosper on the city streets have larger brains than their pastoral relations. So it seems that novel environments, including urban landscapes, may select for street smarts—at least for birds that flock toward the city lights.
Urban areas continue to spread. So to survive, our feathered friends may need to expand their minds as they spread their wings.
—Karen Hopkin and feathered friends
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
*Editor's note (4/28/11): This sentence was changed after publication to correct the types of birds included in the survey.
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6 Comments
Add Comment*We apply phylogenetic mixed modelling in a Bayesian framework to show that passerine species that succeed in colonizing at least one of 12 European cities are more likely to belong to big-brained lineages than species avoiding these urban areas.*
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe text above is from the link indicated in the article.
I did have the impression when reading the article that certain lineages of the same species of passerine birds living in big cities evolved to have bigger brains than their relatives (of the same species, of course) that still live in rural areas.
But the abstract not seems to say the same.
What it seems to say is that sparrows (for example) are well succeeded in colonizing big cities because they pertain to a species that have big brain.
This link is from BBC, and the title is *Adaptable urban birds have bigger brains*.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9468000/9468306.stm
Since brains also require lots of oxygen and food, the city must be a challenging but rewarding place to live... or else its for the birds... take your pick.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is an unspoken assumption here that bigger brains = more intelligent. Yet are larger humans with bigger brains smarter than smaller ones? Are men smarter than women? Are large breed dogs smarter than smaller ones? That original assumption may need to be examined more carefully.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@outsidethebox.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this*We provide the first evidence for the intuitive yet untested hypothesis that relative brain size is a key factor predisposing animals to successful establishment in cities.*
In the abstract (fragment above) the researchers refers to *RELATIVE BRAIN SIZE*. Relative, we can infer, to the size of the body of the animal. In other words: the size of the brain in proportion to the size of the body.
Lets think about a pygmy standing about three feet high. And then about someone six foot tall. So the former must have a brain about 1/8 the volume. Difference in intelligence? Zero. So is the larger person's body "draining" intelligence somehow from him? So is the extra volume of brain only going to maintaining and controlling the extra volume of flesh?
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