Southern pied babblers are less smart when they're under heat stress

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-11-22 11:01

Australia; International; NSW; WA

Derek Keats via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0

Southern pied babblers seem to be less smart and perform worse in learning tasks when under heat stress, according to Australian researchers. The team put the small birds through a set of tasks aimed at testing their associative learning, reversal learning and inhibitory control - first under the temperatures they are used to and then under high temperatures. The researchers say under the hotter temperatures, the babblers learned slower and were less able to control their inhibitions.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

High temperatures are associated with reduced cognitive performance in wild southern pied babblers

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Summary: Global warming is known to affect many aspects of animals’ lives, but its impact on cognition remains largely unexplored. This is an important knowledge gap given that cognition is crucial for animals' ability to adjust to local conditions. We measured learning and behavioural inhibition under naturally occurring normal and high temperatures in wild southern pied babblers. We found that at high temperatures pied babblers took longer to learn an association, and females were also less able to refrain the instinct of pecking at a transparent barrier to reach food, indicating impaired inhibitory control. These findings provide novel evidence of the detrimental effects of heat on cognition in wild animals.

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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 C.S. at The University of Western Australia (UWA) and by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Project grant (no. DP220103823) awarded to A.R.R., B.J.A. and A.T. This work was also supported by the Rotary Club of Melville and the Postgraduate Student Association of UWA through two awards to C.S. 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) and received logistical support from the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria.

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