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Does hippocampal size correlate with the degree of caching specialization?

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Author

Summary, in English

A correlation between the degree of specialization for food hoarding and the volume of the hippocampal formation in passerine birds has been accepted for over a decade. The relationship was first demonstrated in family-level comparisons, and subsequently in species comparisons within two families containing a large number of hoarding species, the Corvidae and the Paridae. Recently, this approach has been criticized as invalid and excessively adaptationist. A recent test of the predicted trends with data pooled from previous studies found no evidence for such a correlation in either of these two families. This result has been interpreted as support for the critique. Here we reanalyse the original dataset and also include additional new data on several parid species. Our results show a surprising difference between continents, with North American species possessing significantly smaller hippocampi than Eurasian ones. Controlling for the continent effect makes the hoarding capacity/hippocampal formation correlation clearly significant in both families. We discuss possible reasons for the continent effect.

Publishing year

2004

Language

English

Pages

2423-2429

Publication/Series

Royal Society of London. Proceedings B. Biological Sciences

Volume

271

Issue

1556

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Royal Society Publishing

Topic

  • Biological Sciences

Status

Published

Research group

  • Theoretical Population Ecology and Evolution Group

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1471-2954