Mimi Faatz 0:00

I have a chicken that pecks on my back door when she wants a snack. This light tapping alerts the dog who then gets my attention and points at the chicken so that then they both get a treat. Please know that this was not trained behavior. They did this on their own, and that got me thinking. Chickens are pretty smart, but how smart are they? And what's the smartest animal in the world? I'm Mimi Fots, and those are the questions we're answering today on Hello From the Van. First off, how are we defining intelligence or smarts? There's an old quote that gets tossed around about how everyone is smart, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you will go around your entire life thinking the fish isn't very smart. This quote, in all its iterations, is routinely attributed to Albert Einstein, but he never said it. The gist of it is basically that everyone has different skill sets and versions of intelligence. This is especially clear in the animal kingdom. While doing research for this episode, I went to the zoo, I went to the aquarium, I looked in books, I found a 90 set of old encyclopedias, I watched documentaries and even checked online zoologist forums, trying to figure out what are the smartest animals in the world. What I discovered is that there is a lot of um contention around how to rank the smarts of animals. For example, we know that dolphins and whales communicate with each other, but we also know that birds communicate. We just have studied whales and dolphins a lot more. And what about the animals that we don't really know how they communicate? Is a jellyfish truly a brainless blob, or do they know something we don't know? So for today's episode, just know that this is not an exhaustive list or a ranking of smartest animals in any sense of the word. This is more just a roundup of smart animals scientists know about. These are the animals that have been on a lot of lists and in a lot of forums and listed by a lot of scientists. First off, all scientists agree that humans are the world's smartest animals. Ta-da! No complaints here. I have yet to meet a penguin with a podcast. So yeah, this is a pretty simple one. It would appear that this second animal listed at the top of all the lists I found is the chimpanzee, the great ape. We know they can do math, learn sign language, have families, social structures, etc. No real disagreement there. However, it is when we get past these first two slots that things just kind of get sticky. And so, in no particular order, here are some super smart animals. We're starting very small with the bee. There are 25,000 species of bee, and we used to think that they were just smart socially. They have a smart bee-like instinct. We have now learned that bees are considered intelligent in a lot of different ways. They can count, which is very useful for navigation. They can observe and learn. This enables them to differentiate between flowers of different species of plants. They use tools. For example, they will smear animal poo on their nest as a stinky defense against hornets, and they communicate using their bodies. We also know that they have shown emotion-like states, responding to scenarios differently when they are stressed, happy, and content. So, yes, the humble bee is very intelligent. Now let's go to the other end of the scale. We are talking about whales. We know that whales can communicate using a range of different sounds, and toothed whales, like the orca and sperm whales, use echolocation. Another fun thing is that we know that whales in different areas of the world speak different dialects. Whales are also known to learn new songs from other whales that they meet and to work together when they are hunting. Paired with the whales, we also have dolphins who share a lot of the same intelligent traits. Sticking with the uh largest in size, next we're going to move on to elephants. The old phrase, an elephant never forgets, has turned out to be true. Scientists have learned that the temporal lobe, this is the area of your brain that's responsible for creating memory, is the largest relative to body size. Basically, elephants have the brain to never forget. Elephants have also been seen using tools, having a very complex social structure, and we know that they show emotion onto one of my absolute favorite animals in the animal kingdom. The octopus. Here's the deal about the octopus. It has not one, but nine brains. We don't normally think of, oh, super smart animal, octopus. You don't, your brain doesn't naturally go to something in the water. However, an octopus is highly, highly intelligent. They can use tools, they're problem solvers, they can communicate. We know that they will recognize their caretakers at zoos and aquariums. They are incredible escape artists. At our local aquarium, when I went to go do some research for this episode, I learned that they have a five-inch octopus that routinely escapes its keepers. It has learned every trick of the trade to escape its tank, and it is routinely found in the morning in other tanks of other fish. We know that an octopus is incredibly smart. For example, the blanket octopus will rip off the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish called the Portuguese man of war. The octopus is immune to the Portuguese man of war, but the octopus's predators are not. So the octopus will rip off one of these tentacles and then use it like Indiana Jones's whip and whip their predators so that they remain safe, but their predators get stung with these tentacles of the Portuguese man of war. That seems pretty smart to me. We need to talk about different types of intelligence. This next animal has an excellent spatial memory, meaning it can remember the things around it. It's the rat. Rats are incredibly intelligent, finding their way through mazes and problem solving in lab studies. It is believed by some scientists that rats can actually count. We also know that their whiskers are as sensitive as your fingertips. They can hear sounds beyond the range of human hearing. Their eyes can move independently of each other. It is thanks to this intelligence and adaptability that rats are so successful and prolific in the wild. There are 56 species of rattus, and they are found everywhere that humans have settled except Antarctica. Basically, they're smart and they're smart enough to follow humans around. And to round out our list, we're gonna talk about some birds. As you know, birds are very intelligent, but there's different types of bird intelligence. The African gray parrot is considered the smartest individual species of bird. The gray parrot is actually on the endangered species list due to its intelligence. It is so smart that a lot of people have wanted these as pets. This has led to illegal trading and black market purchasing of gray parrots. But why do people want them? Because they are incredibly smart. We know that African gray parrots perform at the level of a five-year-old human child. They can also demonstrate reasoning. Basically, if a kindergartner knows it, well, so can an African parrot. Also in the bird category of smart animals, corvids. These are ravens, crows, magpies, all those long skinny birds. As a group, they are considered the smartest family of birds by many scientists. They are able to problem solve, work together, recognize humans, they emote, and they can be trained. Here's the interesting thing about Corvids. We know that they have small heads and therefore small brains, but they're incredibly smart. The scientific explanation for this brain power, despite having very small heads and very small brains, is that the neurons in their brains are smaller and more tightly packed, giving them the computation power akin to a gorilla. Basically, they can think the same as something that we think is near human intelligence, but in bird form. So there you have it a list of super smart animals. It's not an exhaustive list, however, it was pretty fun. And with that, I'm Mimi Fotz, and this has been Hello from the Van.