Research Summary

Research Summary

[Name of the Writer]

[Name of the Institution]

Research Summary

There is a growing number of animals which shows avoidance of those areas that are linkedwith conspecific death but it is still unclear that how the wild population use these experiences in order to find out the novel predators. Therefore,in this study through experiments it was demonstrated that the white American Crows responds to various death conspecifics through crowding, by increasing the total time to reach for the food particularly in those regions which are linkedwith these events and also by learning about new predators depending on the closeness to dead crows and hawks. In crows, it is observed that when there is any death in their population they respond to that loss by coming in groups and making various noise, therefore the main reason that led to this study was to find out that how the crows respond to danger and how they respond to lose in their population. The hypothesis that was formulated in this study was that whether crows sense danger by some specific stimulants or not and how they respond or what are the strategies that are adopted by them in order to protect themselves against these dangers.

In order to find out the hypothesis three experiments were designed, each with three phases that include conditioning, stimulus presentation and post exposure. Throughout all phases of the experiment a single observer and data collector supplied foodstuff at a constantsite daily at the same time. In the conditioning phases birds at each side approached the foodstuff during the set observation period for 3 continuous days. On the 4th day, the stimulus presentation phase was started. During this phase, volunteers wearing masks with neutral expressions approached the site where the crows were present and the mob formation activity was observed. Once all the data were collected from these experimental sites then the data was analyzed using statistical tools. In order to determine the molding and scolding responses, one-way ANOVA was used to compare the crowd size among the stimuli. The findings of the study were quite astonishing, once the volunteers reached the location the crows mobbed and also they increased their time to reach the food that was present on the given site which approached to 72 hours after they observed humans with a dead crow, however when the same volunteer reached the site with same masks but with a dead pigeon, same response was not elicited in the birds. This was interesting and it helped to assess that for crow’s dead conspecifics shows a sign of danger rather than dead hetero-specifics. When the stimulus was offeredthenprevention of foodstuff was prominent when the crows saw a dead crow with a hawk.

Therefore, the hypothesis in this study was proved that crows respond to various threats by mobbing and also they learn about the places and people who are associated with the conspecific death. This research study is important in science because it provides an insight that how animals respond to dangers and what strategies they use in order to recognize various dangers. Although this is a very effective study to determine the response of birds to various dangers but in this experiment, only one stimulant was used and also the defense mechanism of the birds is not explained in this paper. When I first read the abstract I thought that this will provide a brief summary of the crow’s behavior to dead crows but this paper is only focused on one stimulant and one mobbing response of the birds. It would be helpful if the researchers used a variety of stimulants and other defending strategies of the birds.