16 October 2024
Do you know that ravens have paranoid, summary ideas about different minds?
A brand new(*) examine has discovered that ravens are capable of think about being spied upon — a degree of abstraction that was beforehand considered distinctive to people.
— WIRED, 3 Feb 2016(*)
Ravens are well-known to cache meals however who owns the stash operates on the precept: “Until one other raven is actively guarding it, no matter meals I see is mine.” The finder eats or re-hides the cache. We’d name this thievery.
To stop thieves, a raven with a lot of meals waits till all the opposite ravens depart earlier than caching his treasure. He’ll even go to a spot the place nobody can see him hiding it.
Scientists thought {that a} raven needed to see one other raven earlier than he went to all this bother. Then a examine in 2016 examined whether or not ravens can think about potential thieves they can’t see.
The examine, revealed in Nature Communications, discovered that if a close-by peephole was open, ravens guarded pockets of meals towards discovery in response to the sound of different birds — even when they didn’t see one other hen. This was not replicated when the peephole was closed, regardless of listening to the identical auditory clues.
Ravens are so good that they will think about thieves, similar to we are able to. Is it a blessing or a curse to be this clever?
Watch how ravens think about what one other raven is pondering on this video from BBC Earth.
