Smart as a duck
“She’s as smart as a duck” is not a phrase that would ordinarily be thought of as complimentary. The animal species that we tend to heap intellectual praise upon tend to be apes, dolphins and perhaps corvid bird species such as crows. Ducks are not usually in the smarty pants conversation, but we may have to rethink that assessment.
For a start, when ducks sleep, they sleep with one eye open, allowing one half of their brain to rest while the other is alert looking for predators. This is called unihemispheric sleep as it allows only one half of the brain to sleep at a time. We got very excited when we found that dolphins and whales indulge in unihemispheric sleep, it just added to their lustre. Now we know that ducks do it, too.
If unihemispehric sleeping still seems just a little instinctive, consider that ducks also seem able to think abstractly. Abstract intelligence is necessary for things such as creative problem-solving, humour, novel ideas and inventing. We previously believed that abstract thought was the province of just a few select species, not including ducks, until a study in 2016 conducted by researchers from the University of Oxford and published in the journal Science.
This study set out to explore how ducks think and as part of that, the experiment involved newborn mallard ducklings. We know that ducklings will imprint — that is, they will follow around the first thing that they see. This imprinting behaviour has traditionally been interpreted as a sign of comedic lack of intelligence, but it could be quite the reverse. For instance, the ducklings in this trial might have been shown two spheres when first hatched. Later, when shown two triangles, they would follow them, but they would not follow a cube and a cuboid. This means those little ducks are able to understand abstract concepts such as “same” and “different”, remember them and then apply them to totally new objects without any social training or cues.
Is it amazing that ducks can think abstractly? Or is abstract thinking common in the animal world, and the amazing thing is that we are just discovering the capacity to understand it?
Ducks are not usually in the smarty pants conversation, but we may have to rethink that assessment.