Back in October, a study came out from the Max Planck Institute in Germany looking at reconciliation behaviors in carrion crows after instances of aggression. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/et…
Popular media has recently turned its attention on this rather fascinating paper, which is great. A drawback though is that some of the more interesting details get dropped from the popsci articles. dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar…
As it happens I’ve got a long car ride ahead of me so I thought it might be fun to live tweet the paper. If you have any interest in the relationships of corvids I strongly suggest you tune in. I know I got a lot out of this paper!
First let’s starts with the key bits of context. The paper is titled “Reconciliation and third party affilitation in carrion crows.” It was authored by Miriam Sima, Theresa Matzinger, Thomas Bugnyar, and Simone Pika.
For those that don’t know, carrion crows are native across Europe and Western Asia. They’re very similar to American crows though they have a more robust cooperative breeding system.
Ok let’s get to the fun content in the paper, starting first with information provided in the introduction.
Social relationships are important to support forms of cooperation, but also invite conflicts and aggression between individuals.
Losing conflicts begets more losses/being attacked again later.
Losing conflicts begets more losses/being attacked again later.
To cope, social animals have developed conflict management behaviors like social hierarchies, conflict avoidance, greeting signals, and post conflict behaviors.
Post conflict behaviors include things like reconciliation (make up between aggressor and victim) and third party affiliation (aggressor and victim get love later from an uninvolved 3rd party)
Reconciliation behavior will be favored if it benefits a valued relationship, but not if the two involved aren’t otherwise close. (Why spend time making up with a stranger)
Therefore reconciliation happens less in species with long term monogamous systems, since interactions with outsiders happen less often.
Corvids are a good model to ask questions about conflict resolution because the nature of their interactions/conflicts changes as they age (young birds=lots of strong and weak relationships, old birds=few strong relationships)
and across the season (breeding season=few strong relationships, non breeding season=more weak relationships)
Studies have previously been done on ravens, Eurasian jays, jackdaws and rooks. So far only ravens have shown reconciliation behavior. In the other species, studies were done on older birds where relationships are more crystallized, which might account for that difference.
Ok brief intermission while my pup takes a potty break 
She’s never seen snow before. Omg she’s so excited
