Steven Novella

What that means is they do mate with an individual male long term in a somewhat monogamous relationship.

But...

They get a little on the side, right?

So they will also mate with other males to improve the fitness of their children, right?

But her hubby is probably also hooking up with other female chickadees, right?

Yeah.

So what they found was that when a female chickadee hooks up with a male bird that's not her mate, they almost always are more intelligent than their mates, right?

So again, this is a chickadee.

They don't do literal IQ tests, I'm sure, but you realize that.

So you kind of shotgun, like, what kind of intelligence are we talking about?

Specifically, so chickadees, they do not migrate.

And what they do is they hide food for the winter, right?

So then they need to find it again.

So they have an amazing visual spatial memory and ability to find the food that they've hidden under the ground and all over the place.

And so that was the measure.

So the males that are better at finding food, that have better visuospatial intelligence, do have, and somewhat dramatically so, disproportionately represented in this side hookup activity and what they call extra pair copulations.

That's the technical term.

So yeah, so there's a significant, a fairly significant advantage to being more intelligent in terms of your visuospatial cognitive ability

Uh, in terms of being, how many, how much of that next generation you are responsible for and also having larger weight, you know, the weight of their offspring is greater, you know?

Well, we don't know, right?