hello tweets,

i just received this story and thought i'd share it with you.

regards,

Devorah A. N. Bennu, PhD
email:nyneve at amnh.org or nyneve at myUW.net
work page http://research.amnh.org/ornithology/personnel/bennu.htm
personal pages http://research.amnh.org/users/nyneve/

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 07:49:50 -0700

The Nando Times: Study suggests migratory birds may have better
long-term memory

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (April 28, 2003 5:14 p.m. EDT) - Birds that migrate seem
to have better long-term memories than ones that don't find their
way back to the same place year after year.

In what they say may be the first scientific evidence that memory
duration is related to migration, a team of German researchers tested
the idea and reported their results for Tuesday's online issue of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The memories of garden warblers, which migrate, were tested against
the closely related Sardinian warblers, which do not, by Claudia
Mettke-Hofmann and Eberhard Gwinner of the Max Planck Research Center
for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany.

Hand-reared birds from both species were left in a pair of attached
rooms for 8 1/2 hours. One of the rooms contained food and the other
did not.

After various delays ranging from four days to a year the birds
were reintroduced to the rooms, but neither room contained food this
time.

For up to a year the migratory garden warblers spent more time
checking out the room that had previously contained food, while the
Sicilian warblers preferred that room only for about four weeks, and
showed no preference after that.

The researchers conclude that migration helps birds develop
stronger memories to help find preferred stopover spots and breeding
grounds. They note, however, that the experiment involved only two
types of bird and the possibility that other factors are involved in
the birds memories cannot be excluded.