Baby bird brain? This bird seems to get dumber as it produces more chicks

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-12-21 11:01

Australia; NSW; WA

Derek Keats

As female Southern Pied Babblers age, they tend to have more chicks every year, and to become less intelligent, according to Australian and international researchers. They put 38 of the wild birds through a series of cognitive tests, and say females appeared to be worse at the tasks if they were older. The researchers say the older females tended to produce more fledglings per year compared to younger females and this appeared to follow the same trend as cognitive ability, suggesting the birds may be losing cognitive ability as they become more fertile. The team says this is probably a trade-off between intelligence and fertility as the birds make use of the limited resources available to them.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

General cognitive performance declines with female age and is negatively related to fledging success in a wild bird

Summary: Most animals use cognition to guide their behaviour, but high cognitive performance can be energetically costly. We tested wild southern pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) on three cognitive tasks that measure the ability to learn associations, adjust them when conditions change, and control counterproductive behaviours. We found that individuals performing better in one task performed better in all, showing “general” cognitive performance (GCP). GCP declined with age in females while their reproductive success tended to increase. Accordingly, individuals with higher GCP raised fewer fledglings per year, suggesting a trade-off between the resources invested in reproduction and cognitive performance.

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Research The Royal Society, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of Western Australia, Macquarie University

Funder: This work was funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program through a scholarship awarded to Camilla Soravia at the University of Western Australia. The KRR, the study site where this research was based, was financed by the Universities of Cambridge and Zurich, the MAVA Foundation and the European Research Council (grant no. 294494 to Tim Clutton- Brock) and received logistical support from the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria.

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