Short Wave - Animal Slander! Debunking 'Birdbrained' And 'Eat Like A Bird'

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Welcome back to "Animal Slander," the series where we take common expressions about animals and debunk them with science. Today on the show, we tackle "birdbrained" and to "eat like a bird" with biologists Corina Newsome and Alejandro Rico-Guevara. Follow Maddie and Emily on Twitter. Their usernames are @maddie_sofia and @emilykwong1234. Plus, send us your animal slander—and questions and praise—by emailing the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Water in the quiet. Be seated. Hey, everybody. Maddie Safaya in the house? No, really. In my house. Back in the closet.

Like me, Emily Kwong here, also reporting from home with some animal slander. Yes. Honestly, it feels so good to be doing another episode of animal slander. You know, just really sitting in our love of animal slander. facts and truth and justice. Absolutely. If you haven't heard an episode of animal slander before, this is how it works. We look at common phrases about animals. And then we look at the science to try to figure out whether or not they are true or slander. It's the type of nonsense we need right now. We could all use a little break these days. You know who needs a break, quong? Birds.

The stuff people say about them. Oh, totally. Like the phrase bird brained, implying someone's scatterbrained or dumb. Yeah. Or saying somebody's eating like. a bird when they don't eat very much. Which is some weird diet culture nonsense. It's pure garbage. All right, Kwong, here we go. Let's do this. All right, today on the show, the courtroom of science will hear the cases of bird-brained and eat like a bird.

Proceed. Right, Safaya. First up, bird-brained. Again, people say this when they're implying somebody needs to get it together or they're scattered. Yeah, clearly not a compliment. Right. So for more on this, you know, you know, you talked to Karina Newsom.

Hello. Hi, Emily. Yeah. Hey, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. Good. My name's Emily Kwong. Karina's a grad student at Georgia Southern University studying birds. And before that, she was a zookeeper. She's got a deep, well of experience to draw upon for today's episode. What's your relationship with that phrase birdbrained?

I usually get a little bit offended when I hear the word bird brained as a person who has spent a lot of time training birds. for the purpose of education and showing off your natural behaviors, I've gotten a chance to look very closely at how birds think and understanding the way that they think and being very impressed with their cognition. And so when I hear people use bird-brained as an insult, I am then personally insulted. You got to stand by your birds.

Start enough strong, Kwong. I mean, you got to set the tone. Okay, trusted expert witness, Karina Newsom, approaching the bench. Hit us with that sweet, sweet evidence. Karina says birds are overall pretty smart. Cognition depends on the species, of course, but birds in the Corvid family, like crows and ravens, are wicked smart. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They can memorize faces.

There were super cool experiments on that. And some crows can make tools, which is usually associated with primates. Correct. And you know what other birds are smart? Parrots. They are incredibly social animals. They are also very skilled at mimicry. at recognizing, even memorizing patterns, at picking up on behavioral cues from humans.

Karina says that parrots are tough pets precisely because they're so smart. You have to give them mental stimulation. And if you don't, they're going to occupy themselves, which oftentimes may end up looking like biting through your furniture, tearing apart your shoes, wreaking havoc on your home. Parrots need constant mental stimulation or else it's just havoc. And all of this has to do with the connections inside their brains. Ooh, do I smell a little data quang? Oh, you do. You better believe you do.

So a couple years ago, this study came out that looked at brains across different types of birds. Songbirds, parrots, various birds of prey. And the study looked closely at this part of the brain called the medial spiroform nucleus, which helps connect the cerebellum to the telencephalon. The cerebellum is at the back of the brain and deals with muscle movements, balance, that kind of stuff. Do you know what that is? Yeah. Yeah.

I know stuff quang. Okay, fine. Well, do you know what the telencephalon is? Yes. I do. Go right ahead. What is it? Okay.

All right. Give me a second. There's a lot of stuff in the brain. Yeah. It's this really intricate set of structures in the brain that are required for some of the most complex and evolved functions. Yeah, you clearly Googled that. What? I can't.

I'm sorry. You're breaking up. I'm going through a tunnel. Fine. Ma'am. You are in a closet. You can't be going through a tunnel at the same time. All right.

You don't know me. Anyway, moving on. The key here is that the bridge connecting these two parts, the medial spiroform nucleus and birds, is a mark of strong cognitive abilities. And parrots have an unusually large medial spiroform nucleus for their size. So the birds have small little nuggins, but really advanced little nuggins. Oh, yeah, good point. That was my follow-up question to this research Karina was talking about, too.

And so despite the fact that birds have like very, very small brains, usually like the size of like a walnut for sometimes an even larger brain bird, those brains are the most effective at packing in neurons compared to any other brains, including mammalian brains. So you hear that? Birds are punching above their weight when it comes to neural density. Honestly, I'm not surprised. So some birds have about as many neurons in their four brains. than like a primate. So because their brain has some complex folding and the neurons are closer, physically closer together inside of the brain,

they can have a large number of neurons accomplishing a lot of the same goals that animals with bigger brains but fewer neurons have. Okay, Kwong, the verdict on bird brain? Oh, you know what it is, Maddie. Do I even need to say it? Slander! Oh, my God, you're getting so good at that. You taught me how.

Good Lord. Okay, my turn. So I looked into the phrase, eat like a bird. Oh, yeah, very curious about this. People will say that it suggests someone doesn't eat very much, that they're like peckish. Right, which, you know, the official NPR shortwave position is that just don't comment on how much or how little somebody eats. You know what I mean? Generally speaking. Yeah, mind your own food business. Yes. So, okay, let us start our examination of eat like a bird by considering the simple humming. bird. Do you know how they eat, dear Kwong? No. No, I do not, dear Maddie, but I fear you are about to

tell me an excruciating detail. First of all, let me start off by saying you're welcome. Second, let me introduce you to Alejandro Rico Guevara. He is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington. And curator of birds at the Berk Museum at the University of Washington. But before that, when he was a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, he was part of one of my favorite bird eating related experiments ever. So hummingbirds have really long tongues that dart out to get at nectar. And for a long time, scientists thought that the tongue worked like a tiny, tiny little tube, so small that the nectar kind of just shoots up the tongue on its own by what's called capillary action. Ali and his boss, Margaret Rubega, they did not buy this capillary action theory. Oh, huh.

We were discussing how the equations and the predictions from those capillary equations don't really make sense in terms of what the actual behavior of the hummingbirds in nature looked like. But here's a thing, Kwong. One does not simply eyeball a hummingbird tongue. These little tongues are as thin as a fishing line, and they dart in and out of the beak at like 15 to 20 times per second. Whoa. So to solve these problems, what we devise were tiny transparent flowers with flat sides, so we could film through it and see the action happening. And we needed high-speed video because it's happening so fast.

So we were filming between 1,000 and 2,000 frames per second just to see how the tongue would interact with the nectar. So cool. All right, so they made little glass flowers so they could film through them? That's pretty genius. Yeah. And what they saw, Kwong, it changed the hummingbird game. What we saw is that the hummingbird tongue when it touches the nectar,

First, the portion that is inside the liquid unfolds and it has little fringes on the edges of those tubes and those open up. So it definitely isn't just a static little tube. No, not even close. As the tongue is shooting out of the beak, it's compressed by the beak. But when the tip of the tongue hits the nectar, it splits into two like a little snake tongue and those tips, they have these little flaps that open and those flaps fill up with nectar. That is so amazing. So they got to see all these wild hummingbird parts in action. Yes. And when the rest of the tongue, like the back of the tongue, it gets out of the beak. It's no

longer compressed. And then boom, that part fills up too. Super fast. And when I say super fast, I mean less than a hundredth of a second. And so as the tongue rolls back into the beak, These flaps then kind of close on themselves, hanging on to the nectar as it makes its way back up to the bird. So it's like a retractable tongue spoon. Is that right? Well, I've, uh... Am I getting it? I've never heard anybody describe it that way.

But yeah, sure. Parts of the flaps have spoon-like qualities. It's actually called a nectar trap. And that nectar is only released into the... the throat when the hummingbird goes to stick out its tongue again, and that resets the trap. This is incredible. And you said this is happening at 15 times per second? Yep. Dude! I know. I know, dude. And the kicker is that this is pretty much happening passively. Like, the birds aren't working tiny tongue muscles to make this happen. They literally just have to stick their tongue out. Can you imagine being

the first human to ever see this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Ollie says like, you know, whatever. It was pretty cool or whatever. It was completely wild. Like I couldn't believe, like I thought something was off. So we repeated it a hundred times and we finally convinced ourselves that, yeah, everybody was wrong and that this was much cooler and faster than anybody predicted. I will tell you, Kwan, there is no sweeter moment in science to say we couldn't believe it. We did it a hundred times. And yeah, everybody else was wrong. Amazing. Amazing. But Maddie, Okay, how much does it eat? That is the whole point of this lawsuit that we are trying in our fake animal slander court.

So is it slanderous to say you eat like a bird? First of all, do not test the integrity of this court or suggest that it doesn't have any. Second of all, that's not the coolest part, but fine. Yes, some hummingbirds can drink their entire body weight in sugar in one day. Whoa. The key is to drink a little bit at a time, but drink all day. era day. When you think about how much a hummingbird drinks and compare it to a human, for instance, it would be an insane amount of, you know, sugar water, like soda, like drinking two cans of

soda per minute or so just to maintain yourself throughout the day. Yeah, no, thank you. But so the verdict on eat like a bird? Yeah. So as an overall rule, it is slanders to say birds don't eat a lot. Some birds can go a long time without eating, that's true, but there are a lot of birds that eat a ton, you know, especially the little guys. They can eat a lot in proportion to their little tiny weight. So like the hummingbird? Yes, exactly. So the verdict? Slander!

Mostly, most of the time. Is that a tiny gavel? I mean, don't worry about it. Make your way. Make your way. All right, shortwave listeners, that's it for the latest installment of animal slander. If you have an idea for animal slander, you can see. Email it to us at shortwave at npr.org.

So far, we've done birds, we've done bats, we've done fish. You tell us what to cover next. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Jeff Brumfield, and fact-checked by Emily Vaughn. I'm your host, Maddie Safaya. And I'm your reporter, Emily Kwog. We'll see you next time on NPR Shortwave. All right. I mean, honestly, the energy was great, and it was weirder than usual.