Anyone want to guess what I have to say about that “crow shares food with hungry mouse” video?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about you can find the now viral video here: reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeing…
So is this crow generously sharing food with a hungry mouse? I’ll give you two options: long answer or short answer. The short answer is: no. The long answer is: no, but here’s why.
So as a little background, in animal behavior food sharing is defined as the transfer of a defendable food item from one individual to another or the joint use of a monopolized item.
Obviously these definitions are both broad and somewhat subjective. Because of this you’ll see a range in how different papers describe how common this behavior is.
Some might say it occurs frequently while others say it is rare depending on if they’re including tolerated theft, food transfers during courtship, etc.
Among corvids, evidence of food sharing has been suggested in ravens, rooks, scrub-jays and northwestern crows, but it’s been most formally studied in jackdaws.
Studies on jackdaws show that donor initiated sharing is more common than in primates, sharing decreases as the birds get older, and that patterns of food sharing support both the altruism hypothesis (tit for tat) and the harassment hypothesis (take this and leave me alone!)
Here are some of those studies if you want to learn more researchgate.net/profile/Selvin….
jstor.org/stable/pdf/453…
jstor.org/stable/pdf/453…
A key thing among all these studies is that food sharing is taking place within social groups, not with strangers and not with other species (though interspecific i.e. between species food transfers have been observed in insects).
And even within those groups donor initiated food sharing has been pretty infrequently observed (outside of breeding contexts) so the likelihood that a crow would share with a mouse is really tiny.
So with that in mind how else could we explain what this crow was doing? There’s a key moment after the crow stuffs the food into the crack where it picks up leaves and other debris to put on top. That’s the smoking gun because it indicates that it’s trying to cache the food.
5 times it places different stuff on the food. You don’t try to hide things you’re giving away. That’s like having a garage sale but your never open the garage door.
“But the mouse was right there, how did the crow not know it would take it?!” Well one, the mouse was hidden from view and that crack was the nearest cache location. But two, crows aren’t very adept at thwarting cache theft because they don’t really need to be.
Some corvids are obligate cachers (pop quiz: name one besides the subjects of the attached lit) and are very good at detecting and avoiding cache theft. link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Another hypothesis I’ve seen is that the crow was trying to bait the mouse with food but then slow it down by putting stuff on top so that it could attack and kill it. I’m just going to short answer this one since this is a long enough thread already: no.
So there you have it. And yes, I’m really fun at parties.
