Is there a correlation between being warm blooded and intelligence?

Question

There are very intelligent parrotts that solve puzzles, some member of the crow family use tools (I don't think they live in big flocks either, but I am not sure how big a flock they live in) and a stork that had learnt to fish by using bread thrown for ducks.

Good answer Laluna, which gives another side to this question are there cold blooded creatures that are more intelligent than their brain/head size would allow

Yvannek, how should I rephrase my question ... Is there a link between being warm blooded and an optinum body tempreture at which the brain functions best.
Yvannek, how should I rephrase my question ... Is there a link between being warm blooded and an optinum body tempreture at which the brain functions best.

I have never had a parrot, I remember seeing some wild ones on TV (I think they were parrots) that were given puzzles the same way squirrels were at one time.

Sorry Yvannek, didn't mean to put that addittion on twice - it just when I edited it I couldn't find the spell check, so I copied it on to word, I thought I had written over it.

Answer 1

No there is not. Some Cold Blooded Reptilians are quite clever and react to stimuli and can solve problems on how to get at prey or get out of a problem situation and remember how they did it as well.
It is difficult to clarify Intelligence within creatures, some seem clever, but are actually imatating or learn with repetition technique rather than intelligence, some just react to outside stimuli and do not act with an intelligent framework that we set up.

Answer 2

I think it's mostly that people don't want to -look- for intelligence in cold-blooded animals.

Saw video once of an alligator... let me set the scene. This is in a neighborhood where every block is set up around a retention pond. A small area on each pond has been left "natural", they call it a "conservation area" but mostly it's invasive exotic species... anyway. On one of these ponds, there was a guy who would feed the fish every day. This gator would come over to his yard about once a week, grab one of the carp or catfish that would come up for the bread that the guy would throw, take the fish back over to the "conservation area", position the fish to where the it was on top of it's (the gator's) snout, and sink, where all you could see was the fish and two nostrils. Well, in the trees overhanging the pond, there were always herons or egrets or anhingas, and they couldn't resist a free fish, so they 'd fly down to the water to grab this fish that had "floated up". Gator would throw the fish, grab the bird, eat the bird, find the fish, eat the fish, and be good until the next week when the situation would replay itself.

Cold-bloodedness = stupidity? I think not.

Answer 3

Intelligence is the ability to understand and change situations to suit survival.

Warm blooded creatures are faster reacting and have a faster metabolism, in consequence we would need faster adaptive intelligence.

We may find a highly intelligent rock somewhere in space that has taken billions of years to be so. However how a rock needs to be adaptive and how we would discern its intelligence I do no know.

Are you sure your Parrot hasn't discerned that if it mimics a sound; you feed it. Shows an intelligence of sorts.

Although a long conversation with a worm seems a problem to me.

We have some youth near us that would make incredibly good novelty 'spitting door stops' although they may need training to not say the 'F' word every 3 seconds.

Answer 4

from technical point of view, the answer is no. Correlation is a mathematical relation between two values; the more of one, the more (or less) of the other.
In this case, however, becoming warm blooded was like crossing a barrier, finding a solution in one aspect. (evolutionary concept). You are no more warm blooded than your dog, but I presume you are more intelligent than him.
So, on the Earth, development of intelligence was connected and even maybe prompted by being warm blooded, but there is no further correlation.
You should reframe your question.

Answer 5

Consider the most intelligent animals..Humans, Chimps, Dolphins, Gorillas.... they are all warm blooded.Cold blooded animals like fish and reptiles aren't considered as intelligent.So there is a good positive correlation although, strictly speaking you cant do correlation with discrete values (like names of animals) only continuous values. You can't have degrees of warm bloodedness(eg a human hasn't got warmer blood than a chimp, a chimp warmer than a dolphin etc).
For a proper correlation you would have to plot temperature of the blood as the x axis and intelligence as the y.

Answer 6

Maybe most of the cold blooded animals' actions are prompted by the need to maintain a constant body temperature, hence it has neither time nor energy for developing intelligence.
Warm blooded animals are free from temperature worries and can concentrate on other stuff.
wild theory really

Answer 7

From what I knew there was no link like that, but a measure of intelligence is found in all life that has a brain of reasonable size. After all, if one can teach a man to pick his clothes up one can do anything, eh? (Kidding!)
It's just that we have different ways of learning things.

Answer 8

I guess we can generalise and say - YES. But I once had a diamond python who was cleverer than my husband so go figure!