Female Southern Pied Babblers Get Stupider As They Produce More Offspring

Having lots of children isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

© by GrrlScientist for Forbes | LinkTr.ee

Southern pied babbler (Turdoides bicolor) at Marakele National Park, South Africa. (Credit: Derek Keats / CC BY 2.0)

An international team of scientists made a strange discovery recently. They found that as female southern pied babblers age, they produce more offspring — but they become stupider in the process.

Southern pied babblers, Turdoides bicolor, are medium-sized black-and-white songbirds that reside in arid and semi-arid regions of Africa’s savannah and Kalahari desert (more here). They live in groups and are cooperative breeders, each group consisting of a dominant reproductive pair and variable numbers of subordinate helpers. The dominant pair produces approximately 95% of the offspring in the group and, on average, only 4% of subordinate helpers originate from non-natal groups each year.

The study population in the Kalahari desert has been intensively monitored since 2003 and is habituated to the presence of people, so researchers can test the wild birds with a variety of cognitive tasks. In this study, the scientists captured, tested, and released multiple generations of pied babblers to assess their cognitive abilities as the birds mature. During the study (2018–2021), the population comprised 14 groups of birds with a group size of 2–7 adults. Over…