677
Owls
(lemmy.world)
Tom Cox @cox tom
Almost certainly the best thing I wa ever told about owls was when I met an owl handler and he told me that the wild owls in the sanctuary where he worked worried about the tame show owls there and sometimes stopped by to leave them shrews and mice as presents.
Owls might be interesting birds but they've got the brains the size of a grape.
Total size is secondary.
Number of neurons / brain size in comparison to total body size is a common metric used to predict intelligence. Bigger bodies need more neurons dedicated to control and coordinator muscles and organs.
Besides the excess neutrons, it helps if the animal frequently have free time and energy available after hunting for food as well as not needing to constantly watch for predators.
Even then it's just a vague correlation, not a strong prediction.
Bird brains are small in general. Therefore the high intelligence of some species was quite surprising. There's some fresh research showing that bird neurons are way smaller than mammal neurons - so quite an impressive number of them can be fitted in a small brain. They have a small brain with a big computational power. My pet theory is that this characteristic could have been present already in the dinos, making them smart instead of dull.
Sounds like an adaptation to cut weight for flight, like how they have hollow bones too.
You see your brain is bigger than that of an owl but still you didn't even look up established fakt about intelligence and rather made a stupid comment that is making the same argument as the nazis did back then.
godwins law strikes again, end of thread lol
Eh? The Nazis had opinions on owls?
I'm just saying they are not smart. The idea of the wise owl is a myth they have the smallest brain to body size of any bird. There's more going on in the head of a pigeon
The nazis financed research that should show that white people have bigger brains and therefore are more intelligent.
Yes that's correct brain size is not a useful measurement to detect intelligence between humans but between different species it's a good estimate.
Owls do not have very big brains, and what they have is almost entirely given over to optical and audio processing. This is all very easily verified.