What crows teach us about death | Kaeli Swift (re-release)

Elise Hu (0:00)

Where I live, October means pumpkins on porches and fake cobwebs stretched across just about every bush. My family has been planning their Halloween costumes for weeks. It's a holiday with ancient roots, and plenty of cultures around the world have their own traditions for honoring the dead and the mysterious. But whether or not you celebrate, it's a fun time to lean in to the strange and the spooky. For October's TED Talks Daily playlist, we have gathered five haunting talks covering everything from grieving crows to zombie roaches. They might give you a few chills, but they're also full of weird, wonderful discoveries that remind us just how fascinating our world is. Happy listening.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hue. Crows are famously clever. They can recognize individual human faces and remember them.

But what surprised me most was learning how they behave around their dead. When a living crow comes across one of its own that has died, it often sounds the alarm and others flock in to gather around the body. Animal behaviorist Kaeli Swift wanted to understand why. In her talk from 2020, she shares what she discovered when she staged crow funerals of her own, with a little help from some masks, and what crows might reveal about how all animals, including us, make sense of death. Fair warning, though, as she put it, suffice to say, we found these wakes can get a little weird. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the day.

Kaeli Swift (1:49)

Whether we want to or not, humans spend a great deal of time considering death. And it's possible we've been doing so since shortly after homo sapiens first began roaming the landscape. After all, the first intentional human burial is thought to have occurred around 100,000 years ago.

What might those early people have been thinking as they took the time to dig into the earth, deposit the body, and carefully cover it up again? Were they trying to protect it from scavengers or stymie the spread of disease? Were they trying to honor the deceased? Or did they just not want to have to look at a dead body? Without the advent of a time machine, we may never know for sure what those early people were thinking. But one thing we do know is that humans are far from alone in our attention towards the dead. Like people, some animals, including the corvids, the family of birds that houses the crows, ravens, magpies, and jays, also seem to pay special attention to their dead. In fact, the rituals of corvids may have acted as the inspiration for our own. After all, it was the raven that God sent down to teach Cain how to bury his slain brother Abel.

But despite this clear recognition by early people that other animals attend to their dead, it's only fairly recently that science has really turned its attention towards this phenomenon. In fact, a formal name for this field, comparative fanatology, wasn't first introduced until 2016

In this growing field, we are beginning to appreciate what a rich place the natural world is with respect to how other animals interact with their dead. And it's in this growing body of knowledge that that time machine to our early ancestors might be possible.

So, what are we learning in this growing field? Well, right now, we can split our understanding into two main groups. In the first, we have animals that display stereotyped, predictable behaviors towards their dead, and for whom much of what we understand about them comes from experimental studies. This group includes things like the social insects, bees, and ants, and termites. And for all of these animals, colony hygiene is of critical importance. And so, as a result, these animals display rigorous undertaking behaviors in response to corpses. For example, they may physically remove carcasses from the colony, they may consume them, they may even construct tombs. We see similar hygiene-driven responses in some colony-living mammals. Rats, for example, will reliably bury cage mates that have been dead for 48 hours.

In our other group, we have animals that display more variable, perhaps more charismatic behaviors, and for whom much of what we understand about them comes from anecdotes by scientists or other observers. This is the animals whose death behaviors I suspect might be more familiar to folks. It includes organisms like elephants, which are well known for their attendance to their dead, even in popular culture. In fact, they're even known to be attracted to the bones of their deceased. It also includes animals like primates, which display a wide variety of behaviors around their dead, from grooming them to prolonged attention towards them, guarding them, even the transportation of dead infants. And that's actually behavior we've seen in a number of animals, like the dolphins, for example. You may remember the story of Taliqua, the orca in the resident J-pod in the Puget Sound, who during the summer of 2018, carried her dead calf for an unprecedented 17 days.