Our family and other animals: do we deliberately downplay other species' intelligence?

I recently heard about a project investigating canine intelligence, the results being that man's best friend can distinguish similar-sounding words, even if spoken by strangers. Yet again, it appears there is a less and less that makes our species unique: from the problem-solving skills of birds to social insects' use of farming techniques we find ourselves part of a continuum of life rather than standing alone at the apex.

Reading the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom's thought-provoking book Superintelligence, I was struck by his description of the variation of human intellect (from as he put it, Einstein to the village idiot) as being startling narrow when compared to the potential range of possible intelligences, both biological and artificial.

The complexity of animal brains has been analysed by both quantitive and qualititive methods, the former dealing with such measurements as the number of neurons while the latter looks at behaviour of members of a species, both in the wild and under laboratory conditions. However, a comparison of these two doesn't necessarily provide any neat correlation.

For example, although mammals are generally - and totally incorrectly - often described as the pinnacle of creation due to their complex behaviour and birth-to-adult learning curve, the quantitive differences in neural architecture within mammals are far greater than those between amphibians and some mammalian families. In addition, there are many birds, mostly in the Psittacidae (parrot) and Corvidae (crow) families, that are both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to most mammals with the exception of some primates.

I think it was the essays of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould that introduced me to the concept of EQ or encephalisation quotient, which is a label for the brain-mass to body-mass ratio. On these terms, the human brain is far larger than nearly all other species with a similar sized body, the exception (perhaps not surprisingly) being dolphins.

However, it's difficult to draw accurate conclusions just from examination of this general trend: both the absolute size of the brain and neuron density play a fundamental role in cognitive powers. For example, gorillas have a lower EQ that some monkeys, but being a large ape have a far greater brain mass. It could be said then, that perhaps beyond a certain mass the absolute brain size renders the EQ scale of little use. A 2009 study found that different rules for scaling come into play, with humans also having a highly optimal use of the volume available with the cranium, in addition to the economical architecture common among primates.

As historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, the development of farming, at least in Eurasia, went hand in hand with the evolution of sophisticated religious beliefs. This led to a change in human attitudes towards the other animals, with a downplay of the latter's emotional needs and their categorisation as inferior, vassal species in a pre-ordained (read: divinely-given) chain of being.

By directly connecting intelligence - or a lack thereof - to empathy and emotions, it is easy to claim that domesticated animal species don't mind their ruthless treatment. It isn't just industrial agriculture that makes the most of this lack of empathy today; I've seen small sharks kept in a Far Eastern jewellery store (i.e. as decoration, not as future food) in tanks barely longer than the creature's own body length.

Although the problem-solving antics of birds such as crows are starting to redress this, most people still consider animal intelligence strictly ordered by vertebrate classes, which leads to such inaccuracies as the 'three second goldfish memory'. I first noticed how incorrect this was when keeping freshwater invertebrates, namely shield shrimp A.K.A. triops, almost a decade ago. Even these tiny creatures appear to have a range of personalities, or perhaps I should say - in an effort to avoid blatant anthropomorphizing - a wide variety of behaviour.

Now on the verge of setting up a tropical aquarium for one of my children, I've been researching what is required to keep fish in fairly small tanks. I've spoken to various aquarium store owners and consulted numerous online resources, learning in the process that the tank environment needs to fulfill certain criteria. There's nothing in usual in this you might think, except that the psychological requirements need to be considered alongside the physical ones.

For example, tank keepers use words such as 'unhappy' and 'depression' to describe what happens when schooling fish are kept in too small a group, active swimmers in too little space and timid species housed in an aquarium without hiding places. We do not consider this fish infraclass - i.e. teleosts - to be Einsteins (there's that label again) of the animal kingdom, but it would appear we just haven't been observing them with enough rigour. They may have minute brains, but there is a complexity that suggests a certain level of emotional intelligence in response to their environment.

So where does all this leave us Homo sapiens, masters of all we survey? Neanderthal research is increasingly espousing the notion that in many ways these extinct cousins/partial ancestors could give us modern humans a run for our money. Perhaps our success is down to one particular component of uniqueness, namely our story-telling ability, a product of our vivid imagination.

Simply because other species lack this skill doesn't mean that they don't have any form of intellectual ability; they may indeed have a far richer sense of their universe than we would like to believe. If our greatest gift is our intelligence, don't we owe it to all other creatures we raise and hold captive to make their lives as pleasant as possible? Whether it's battery farming or keeping goldfish in a bowl, there's plenty we could do to improve things if we consider just what might be going on in the heads of our companion critters.

Avian Einsteins: are some bird species as clever as primates?

One of the strangest examples of animal behaviour I've ever seen in real life took place in my neighbourhood last year, with what for all intents and purposes appeared to be a vigil or wake. Half a dozen Common myna birds (Acridotheres tristis) were gathered in a circle around a dead or dying member of their species, making the occasional muted noise. Unfortunately I was rushing to get to work and didn't stop to take a photograph, which was a shame as the birds ignored me even when I passed within a few metres of them.

Even though the street was a cul-de-sac, I couldn't help thinking that sitting in the road was not the safest place for the birds to congregate, considering that they could have stayed close by on the grass verge; instead their proximity to the central, non-moving individual seemed to override their concerns for personal safety. 

Some biologists have suggested that this behaviour, mostly known from corvids (that is, the crow family) is due to the birds' instinctive need to advertise the area to others as particularly dangerous. Although there are plenty of cats in my neighbourhood this idea doesn't seem to make sense, at least in this particular instance. There were several trees that would have served as convenient perching locations for the myna birds, who weren't nearly as loud as they usually are.

Without getting too anthropomorphic about it, they were a lot less garrulous than normal, implying a sombre occasion. Far from providing warnings about the locality, the birds were extremely quiet for a gathering of this size; I should know, as myna birds are probably the third or fourth most common species in my garden and their routine screeches and squawks are far from subtle, to say the least. 

So is it possible that despite one of their number no longer moving or making sounds, its fellow birds understood that this inanimate object was one of their kind?  I've occasionally found dead birds of other species such as goldfinches, song thrushes and blackbirds in my garden and none have been the subject of similar behaviour. As an amateur scientist - or indeed anyone with curiosity might do - I researched the subject and found that crows are well known for gathering around bodies of the same species while magpies (another corvid) have even been reported as covering up dead fellows with twigs and the like. Are these reports all April Fool jokes or are some species of Aves unsung geniuses?

Further enquiry led me to discover that the corvid family, which includes ravens and jays, is the pinnacle of avian intelligence, closely followed by parrots. I initially thought that my observations of the myna bird, a member of the Sturnidae family, constituted something new, until I read a 2014 report from the School of Biological Sciences in Malaysia stating that laboratory testing proved them to be better at counting food items than House crows (Corvus splendens). In certain situations then, myna birds are up there with the brainiest of their kind.

In January this year I received another surprise on reading that the three most common avian raptors in northern Australia's tropical savannas - the Brown falcon (Falco berigora), the Black kite (Milvus migrans) and the Whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus) - have been reported as deliberately spreading bush fires. It appears that after lightning has started a wild fire, the birds pick up burning twigs in their beaks or claws and drop them on untouched forest or grassland some tens of metres away. This then causes prey items such as lizards, snakes, rodents and amphibians to flee the new fire zone, only to be picked off by the waiting raptors.

Although birds of prey in North and South America, West African and Papua New Guinea are known to hunt on the edges of wild fires, the ingenuity of their Australian counterparts is without precedent.  What's more, they appear to have been using this behaviour for thousands of years, since it is clearly recorded in local Aboriginal legends concerning 'fire hawks'; only until now, white settlers have ignored the stories due to their implausibility.

A 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has uncovered biological evidence to support advanced avian intelligence. Although their brains are a lot smaller than mammals, especially primates, this is obviously due to the overall diminutive size of the animals themselves. The brain mass to body mass ratio of some bird families is far larger than expected for an animal of that size, approximating that of the most intelligent mammals.

Although bird brains have a somewhat different structure to mammalian brains, the corresponding higher-functioning regions are both comparatively large and have a neuron density double that of primate equivalents. Therefore it appears corvids and some other birds have undergone parallel evolution that has maximised their cognition.

Birds are good at far more than just adapting to new conditions and environments, with the most social (as opposed to solitary) species leading the way in problem solving and abstract thinking. Here are few more examples that prove their cognition can go far beyond basic instinct:

1. Self-recognition: Eurasian magpies (Pica pica) pass the mirror test, meaning they can recognise their reflection as themselves rather than as another member of their species. 
2. Tool usage: various birds use twigs and cactus spines to extract insects, much as chimpanzees insert sticks into termite mounds.  
3. Deception: Woodhouse's scrub jays (Aphelocoma woodhouseii) have been observed moving food caches to deceive onlookers and keep the food to themselves.
4. Planning: Crows have used multi-step planning in tests to retrieve progressively longer sticks with which to reach food. This ability isn't new either, since the 1st century Roman polymath Pliny the Elder observed corvids undertaking similar behaviour to that described in Aesop's fable The Crow and the Pitcher.
5. Exploiting artificial environments: The kea (Nestor notabilis), New Zealand's alpine parrot, has learnt to unzip rucksack pockets to obtain food. Despite being unlike anything in nature, some bird species understand man-made objects.

When I was a child, the term 'bird brain' was employed for derogatory purposes while 'talking' caged birds such as cockatiels, budgies and parakeets were thought of as just mimics without any understanding of what they were saying. This continuation of the Western tradition that humanity is the pinnacle of creation, far superior to all other lifeforms, is now under serious attack. Our prejudices have caused us to ignore the evidence right under our noses, but as per my post on animals that farm, we humans have very few unique traits left. Avian intelligence is undoubtedly different from ours, but perhaps less so than that of dolphins, whose watery environment means they are unlikely to ever be tool makers.

Another issue is that compared to say mammals, there is a far smaller variety of bird forms; even such specialised species as penguins, ostrich and kiwi don't stray far from the generic Aves design, meaning we tend to associate bird intelligence with the most ubiquitous - and comparatively slow-witted - urban species such as house sparrows and feral pigeons.

Beginning in the 1970s, researchers have explored the sometimes controversial notion that if the dinosaurs hadn't died out at the end of the Cretaceous, a small- to medium-sized carnivore such as Troodon would have eventually evolved into a reptile with human-level intelligence. Crows and their kind may not have a primate-sized brain, but these dinosaur descendants are evidently far superior to the dim stereotype we usually assign to them. They may be small, but clearly in this case, size doesn't seem to matter: our feathered friends are capable of far greater mental activity than their songs, squawks and screeches imply.