Crow’s feet filler study omitted pharma funding, gets retracted - Retraction Watch

Wren: Welcome to Bird Brains — the show that takes the oldest insult in the book and turns it into the highest possible compliment. I'm Wren, ornithologist, science communicator, and frankly, a person who has spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at crows and thinking they're staring right back. Because they are. Today we've got a genuinely wonderful lineup — we're talking tool use that would make an engineer blush, what's actually going on inside that glossy black skull, and a story about crows and people that might just make your day. But first, a warm thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps businesses actually integrate A I into their workflows in ways that work; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts covering everything from A I to full SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. These folks make the show possible, and I'm genuinely grateful. Alright — let's get into it. Wren: So, corvid cleverness. Let's start here, because this is where I always want to start, honestly. And today I want to talk about crows and tools — specifically, the kind of tool use that researchers have documented in New Caledonian crows, which are just — they are the rock stars of the corvid world, no disrespect to my local ravens. New Caledonian crows, Corvus moneduloides, are native to the islands of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, and they are the only non-human animals known to manufacture hooked tools in the wild. Not just pick up a stick. Not just drop a rock. They find a plant stem, and they bend it, shape it, create a hook at the end, and then use that hook to fish grubs out of tight crevices in dead wood. That's fabrication. That is intentional modification of a raw material to create a functional object. And look, I know some people hear that and think — well, it's just instinct, it's hardwired. But here's the thing. Researchers have shown that the specific tool designs vary between populations, and that young crows learn their local style by watching older birds. That is culture. That is the transmission of learned technique across generations. Sound familiar? It should. It's one of the hallmarks we use to define human civilization. Now, what makes this even wilder is the problem-solving flexibility these birds show in lab settings. There's a classic experiment — the Aesop's Fable task, researchers call it — where a crow has to figure out that dropping stones into a water-filled tube raises the water level enough to float a treat up within reach. And crows get it. They not only solve it, but they show preferences — they'll choose heavy stones over light ones, solid objects over hollow ones. They understand, on some functional level, the physics of displacement. These are birds. With brains the size of a walnut. And I mean that in the most loving, awestruck way possible, because the lesson here isn't that their brains are small — it's that we've been measuring intelligence all wrong. The architecture matters, not just the size. Wren: Okay, so that brings me perfectly to our second thread — how their minds actually work. Because when most people picture a bird brain, they picture something simple. Reactive. Instinct-driven. And for a long time, scientists assumed the same thing, because the standard framework for measuring animal intelligence was heavily weighted toward brain structures that look like ours — specifically, the neocortex, the layered outer region of the mammalian brain that handles complex thought, planning, creativity. Birds don't have a neocortex. So for decades, the assumption was, well, they probably can't do those things. And then corvids went and did all those things, very publicly, and scientists had to go back and look harder. What they found is extraordinary. Corvids have a region of the brain called the nidopallium caudolaterale — I promise that's the last Latin I'll throw at you today — which functions in remarkably similar ways to the mammalian prefrontal cortex. It's involved in planning, in flexible decision-making, in working memory. It's not the same structure, but it does the same job. Evolution found two completely different paths to the same destination. That's called convergent evolution, and it is one of the most humbling things in all of biology. Now, one of the clearest windows into corvid cognition is their caching behavior — the way they store food for later. Western scrub jays, for example — now called California scrub-jays — have been studied extensively by the researcher Nicola Clayton and her team at Cambridge, and what they found changed the field. These jays don't just hide food. They remember what they hid, where they hid it, and crucially, when they hid it. They track whether a perishable food item has had time to go bad. That is episodic-like memory — the ability to recall a specific past event in its context of what, where, and when. And there's a social layer on top of that. If a jay knows it was watched while caching, it will go back later and re-hide the food in a new location — but only if the watcher was another jay who might steal from it. If a non-jay watched, they don't bother. They are modeling the mental states of other individuals. They know that another jay knows. That is a theory of mind, and it is deeply, deeply impressive. Wren: And that brings me to my favorite part of every episode — the people and corvid connection. Because the science is wonderful, but the stories are what really get me. And I want to tell you about a relationship that unfolded in Seattle, because it is almost too perfect to be real, and yet it is completely documented. A girl named Gabi Mann — she was eight years old when this started — she had a habit of sharing her lunch with the crows in her neighborhood. Dropping bits of food for them, paying attention to them, treating them like neighbors. And the crows noticed. And then the crows started leaving her things. Shiny things, mostly — a button, a piece of blue glass, a small bead, a screw, a corroded metal heart. Over time, she accumulated a whole collection of little gifts left by crows on the bird bath in her garden. Researchers and journalists who looked into this story found it completely plausible and consistent with documented corvid behavior. Crows in Japan have been observed dropping nuts onto crosswalks so that cars will crack them open, and then waiting for the pedestrian signal to go retrieve the nut safely. They are not just solving problems — they are building relationships with the urban environment and with the humans in it. There's also a long tradition, documented across multiple cultures, of ravens forming genuine individual bonds with specific people. Tower of London Ravenmaster Chris Skaife has written about his relationships with individual ravens — how they have distinct personalities, how they recognize him specifically and respond to him differently than to strangers. These aren't tame birds, exactly. They're wild minds that have chosen to engage. And I think that might be the most remarkable thing of all. Not that we study them, but that they study us back. They watch us. They learn our patterns. They recognize our faces — and yes, that's been demonstrated in controlled research too, with crows recognizing and responding differently to individual human faces even years later. We are in their world as much as they are in ours. Wren: So here's where I land every time I come back to corvids. Intelligence isn't one thing. It's not a ladder with humans at the top and everything else stacked below. It's more like — a forest, maybe. Different trees, different shapes, reaching toward the same light in their own particular ways. A crow doesn't need to write a symphony or design a semiconductor to be doing something genuinely, astonishingly smart. It needs to survive in a complex, changing world, and it does that with memory, with creativity, with social savvy, and apparently sometimes with little gifts of corroded metal hearts. I love them. I will never stop loving them. This has been Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three groups of genuinely curious, forward-thinking people, and that's exactly the kind of company I want to keep. If this episode made you look twice at the next crow you see — good. Stay curious. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share the show with someone who needs a little more wonder in their week, and check the link in show notes for sources and further reading. I'm Wren. You've been a wonderful flock. See you next time.