Are these little birds the most stressed out animals in the world?

At first glimpse , the deportment of scrub Jay seems like a sign of intelligence . Whenever they notice another chick see at their intellectual nourishment , they will hide their intellectual nourishment as far out as possible … then start doing that over and over again .

This summons , known as recaching , is meant to confound any possible spies and protect the scrub jay ’s supply of dirt ball . The last whole step – and the one most often point to as a planetary house of intelligence – is where the scrub jay reburies its worms one last time after it ’s clearly alone . Researchers had previously contend that this meant the scrub jay was capable of opine itself in the position of another bird and realise it ’s still potential for another scrub jay to jazz where its food for thought is . If it were able of that sort of abstract thought , it would possess a trait that is otherwise undivided to order Primates .

But now researcher at the University of Gronigen in the Netherlands have a unlike , rather less flattering suggestion . Instead of arouse major cognitive abilities , they suggest the scrub jays keep obliterate food only because the topsy-turvydom of recaching leaves them stressed , baffled , and maybe a little paranoid , as they explicate in PLoS ONE :

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inspire by data-based data , we assume that re - hoard is not prompt by a deliberate feat to safeguard specific caches from theft , but by a general desire to cache more . This desire is brought on by accent , which is determined by the comportment and control of looker-on , and by unsuccessful recuperation attempts .

The researchers tested this idea by creating a electronic computer simulation that would come close how scrub jay act in the wild . Crucially , this pretense had no way of putting itself in the shoes of other virtual skirt , which mean if it kept conceal food after all onlooker were function then the cognitive theory could n’t be the answer :

Our results show that the ‘ practical bird ’ acts as the veridical birds did ; its re - cache ruminate whether it has been watched , how prevailing its onlooker was , and how unaired to that looker-on it has cached . This happens even though it can not attribute mental nation , and it has only a single behavioral normal take over to be previously get wind . Thus , our simulations indicate that corvid re - lay away can be explain without sophisticated social knowledge . Given our specific predictions , our theory can well be tested empirically .

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