New Research Uncovers The Brainy Side Of Wyoming’s Ravens

If there's one thing I've realized about nature, it's quite amazing. For all things to be right in an environment, everything has to work together and be in sync. Researchers have long believed that scavengers like ravens rely heavily on the traffic of predators to survive. While that's partly true, new research shows that ravens are stealthy and rely on reconnaissance missions to stay fed.

For a long time, scientists thought that scavengers would follow large carnivores, like wolves or mountain lions, to their kill sites to clean up on easy food sources. That makes sense, right? You're soaring high in the air and see a pack of wolves heading to lunch. Why not follow them and grab lunch for yourself?

Researchers conducted a reconnaissance mission of their own, using satellite tracking to monitor 69 ravens, 20 wolves, and 11 mountain lions in Yellowstone to better understand how the system worked. To the researchers' surprise, they learned some new things about the raven. Those suckers are smart, have great memories, and have incredible built-in navigation systems.

The raven is an interesting creature and seems to follow the work smarter, not harder way of life. The findings of the new research show that, in addition to following large carnivores to potential meals, the ravens remember where they were able to get a meal in the past and will travel up to 100 miles to revisit prior kill sites.

It truly is fascinating how nature works, and the research from Science.org proves it:

The fact that scavengers can feed for several days on the remains of large ungulate carcasses, such as those typically provided by wolves, alleviates the necessity of being at the right place at the right time. In addition to remembering specific locations to exploit anthropogenic subsidies, ravens also appear to learn that broader landscape areas can be associated with increased carrion availability and/or wolf activity. Consequently, they navigate equally efficiently from distant areas to anthropogenic subsidies as they do to areas with high wolf kill abundance.