currentsinbiology:Country Birds Lack the Smarts of City Birds Life in the city changes cognition, be
currentsinbiology:Country Birds Lack the Smarts of City Birds Life in the city changes cognition, behavior and physiology of birds to their advantage.Birds living in urban environments are smarter than birds from rural environments.But, why do city birds have the edge over their country friends? They adapted to their urban environments enabling them to exploit new resources more favorably then their rural counterparts, say a team of all-McGill University researchers.“We found that not only were birds from urbanized areas better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that surprisingly urban birds also had a better immunity than rural birds,” says Jean-Nicolas Audet, a Ph.D student in the Department of Biology and first author of the study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology. “The town bird and the country bird: problem solving and immunocompetence vary with urbanization” by Jean-Nicolas Audet, Simon Ducatez and Louis Lefebvre in Behavioral Ecology. Published online November 2 2015 doi:10.1093/beheco/arv201Bullfinches in Barbados. Credit: Louis Lefebvre -- source link