• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

Mountain Chickadees have Remarkable Memories–with Ability to Recall Locations of 10,000 Hidden Snacks

Michie

Well-Known Member
Site Supporter
Feb 5, 2002
181,507
65,619
Woods
✟5,808,815.00
Country
United States
Gender
Female
Faith
Catholic
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Lost your keys? Can’t remember where you parked the car? If only you had the memory of a mountain chickadee.

These half-ounce birds, with brains slightly larger than a pea, stash tens of thousands of food items like seeds in tree bark, under dead leaves, and inside pinecones across the mountains and can remember their locations with pinpoint accuracy.

When winter arrives, they can recall the exact locations of their caches, a skill that helps them survive the bitter cold and deep snow of their mountain homes in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

In a new study published April 17 in the journal Current Biology, researchers at CU Boulder and the University of Nevada, Reno identify nearly a hundred genes associated with the birds’ spatial memory, or ability to recall the locations of objects.

The paper also suggests a potential trade-off may exist between having a solid long-term memory and being able to quickly ditch old memories to form new ones. One clue was how many of these genes result in disorders in other animals.


“Chickadees are impressive birds,” said Scott Taylor, the director of CU Boulder’s Mountain Research Station and associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “Their spatial memory is much more developed than many other birds that don’t have to have this strategy to survive cold winters.”

To evaluate the spatial memory of wild mountain chickadees, Taylor’s collaborators at the University of Nevada, Reno, led by biologist Vladimir Pravosudov, designed a clever test. They hung multiple feeder arrays, each with eight bird feeders with seeds in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

Continued below.