Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Five European Magpies (Pica pica) have provided the “first evidence that non-mammals can recognise themselves”, says the Daily Mail.
In the paper published online at Plos Biology the level of self-recognition of Gerti, Goldie, Harvey, Lilly and Schatzi was measured in “mark tests”.
Each of the magpies was observed when it had a brightly coloured mark placed on the throat, under the beak, that could only be seen in a mirror. The observations were made in a cage with a mirror and a cage with a grey non-reflective plate instead of the mirror, and then repeated with ‘sham’ markings, black dots which were not visible against the black of the birds feathers. You can see videos of the birds in the supporting information online.
Initially, as each bird explored the mirror, all displayed aggressive behaviour towards the mirror, such as picking a fight. But for Gerti, Goldie and Schatzi this behaviour stopped quickly, and in the mark test they all showed self-directed behaviour, with Gerti and Goldie managing to remove their marks after a few minutes.
“These songbirds realize that they’re looking at themselves, raising the possibility that they have independently evolved the brain power to support a basic form of self-recognition”, says Science News.
The authors say in the paper that “We do not claim that the findings demonstrate a level of self-consciousness or self-reflection typical of humans. The findings do however show that magpies respond in the mirror and mark test in a manner so far only clearly found in apes, and, at least suggestively, in dolphins and elephants.”
New Scientist adds that “self-recognition was thought to reside in the neocortex, but birds don’t have one”.
This may be a case of convergent evolution, that despite the different brain structures, birds and mammals have developed similar cognitive abilities. “Mammals and birds inherited the same brain components from their last common ancestor nearly 300 million years ago”, the authors say in the paper. But magpies, like apes, have a large brain relative to their body size, and have shown that they have complex cognitive skills with their use and manufacture of tools and episodic-like memory. For example, see this youtube video of a crow, a fellow member of the corvid family, which also includes ravens.
“After finding this kind of intelligence in apes, many people thought it had developed once in one evolutionary line with humans at the end. The bird studies show it has developed at least twice” author Helmut Prior of the Institute of Psychology at Goethe University, Frankfurt, told Reuters.
Image: FWS