Popular Black-capped chickadee grows brain tissue to survive brutal winter
Winter brings fascinating changes to animals. While mammals add weight to stay warm as they hibernate, birds grow more feathers for their long migratory flight south.
And then there’s the Black-capped chickadee, which adds brain tissue, instead of weight or feathers.
The palm-sized bird has a knack for having a good memory—but only in the winter. In colder months, this clever bird survives by feeding on seeds and other food items that it has stored in the ground by memorizing where it buries the sustenance. When it gets hungry, it returns to the burial sites.
It is only capable of doing this in the winter because the memory portion of its brain—the hippocampus—is hard wired to increase in size. Some Chickadees have been shown to grow the piece of the organ by nearly a third, enabling them to recall hundreds of spots they’ve buried food.
This is the wonder of science that is being done right now. There are techniques allowing researchers to get very detailed real-time data on change in the hippocampus over time that’s demonstrating unequivocally that it’s actually getting bigger.
