“Claiming that it is specific to us humans, that only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified,” said Andreas Nieder, the study’s lead researcher. “Because we have at least the crow.”
The post Crows are nature’s mathematical geniuses and sneaky scavengers appeared first on Green Prophet.
If you’ve ever found your roof littered with stray bits of chicken bones, discarded tuna cans, and wrappers from snacks, you’ve probably encountered the handiwork of crows. These feathered scavengers aren’t just opportunistic when it comes to their food – they’re also highly skilled at solving complex problems. They are also highly skilled at evening scores if they have a vendetta against you or your dog.
But recent research has revealed that their intelligence doesn’t stop at finding food scraps and chasing dogs they don’t like; crows are proving to be mathematical savants with an impressive talent for spotting shapes. The research is reported in Science.
“Claiming that it is specific to us humans, that only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified,” said Andreas Nieder, the study’s lead researcher. “Because we have at least the crow.”
Related: Birds in Iran migrate from polluted cities to less-polluted ones
Researchers have been studying carrion crows (Corvus corone), who have already demonstrated their remarkable problem-solving abilities.
In a new study, the crows were presented with sets of six shapes and tasked with identifying the odd one out. The challenge? The odd shape was sometimes just slightly different from the others – a distorted quadrilateral among otherwise perfectly regular shapes, or a crescent moon in a group of stars. And the crows? They aced it, detecting the odd shape with ease, even when it was rotated or scaled.
Crows do geometry
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