Tough Life, Smart Bird
Ambience, Finchhes
Sometimes, a tough life can make a smart bird. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Sewall: We’re trying to understand how things that happen early in life shape a birds communication and social behavior for the rest of their adult life.
Kendra Sewall is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Virginia Tech. She and her team have been studying the behavior of Zebra Finches.
Sewall: So some of the birds that we work with had really normal zebra finch upbringings, but some of them went through things that were little bit tough.
And what’s really interesting in our work is that sometimes a challenge seems to actually be a positive thing, and it can help with brain development and brain growth.
Specifically, we found that our birds who have been through some early life stressors are better at something that’s called “executive function,” and that is described as the ability to control impulsive behavior.
So what we do is we give them something that they want – like a very special type of seed, but we give it to them behind a clear barrier. And the instinct of animals, from primates to birds to children, is to reach for what they want and hit that plexiglass barrier. And you can measure impulse control by looking at how many times an animal will do that before they learn to do the smart thing, which is to reach around to get the seed.
The way I think about it is: how long does it take an animal to learn to stop doing something dumb, so that they can do something smart? The birds that were from these big families where they had to compete to get food and compete to get attention from mom and dad – which you would think might be a bad thing, actually had better impulse control, better executive function.
I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.