‘Food hunt makes brains of urban birds larger’
April 28th, 2011 - 7:06 pm ICT by IANSLondon, April 28 (IANS) Birds living in cities have larger brains because they have to be more resourceful about finding food, says a research.
Urban birds have to adapt to an environment that is not their natural home and find new ways of feeding themselves.
This means that over generations their brains have grown bigger as they think in new ways about how to survive, reports the journal Biology Letters.
The research is the first time that scientists have shown that the size of the brain is a key part of city life for avians, according to the Daily Mail.
The scientists identified ‘urban adapters’ as crows, wrens and tits which all come from the same family and all have larger brains compared to their bodies.
Other small-brained species such as barn swallows do survive in cities but are not true ‘adapters’, said evolutionary biology expert Alexei Maklakov, who led the research.
“A centre of a modern city is a novel and rather harsh environment for most species and the ability to sustain a varied diet or develop novel foraging techniques and perhaps utilise non-standard nesting places, can be beneficial,” he said.
His team from the Evolutionary Biology Centre in Uppsala, Sweden, and the Donana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, studied 82 species of birds from 22 families.
They focused their attentions on 12 cities in Switzerland and France to find out about the relationship between brain size and survival.
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Tags: attentions, avians, barn swallows, biological station, brain size, brains, cities in switzerland, crows, daily mail, evolutionary biology centre, finding food, food hunt, generations, harsh environment, journal biology, new ways, seville spain, species of birds, uppsala sweden, wrens