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Are Tigers 'Brainier' Than Lions?
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 (02-01-2018, 10:12 PM)TheLioness Wrote: Do tigers have larger brains than lions? Yes, does that make them smarter? No.Brain-to-body mass ratio, also known as the brain to body weight ratio, is the ratio of brain weight to body weight, which is hypothesised to be a rough estimate of the intelligence of an animal, although fairly inaccurate in many cases. A more complex measurement, encephalization quotient, takes into account allometric effects of widely divergent body sizes across several taxa.[3] The raw brain-to-body mass ratio is however simpler to come by, and is still a useful tool for comparing encephalization within species or between fairly closely related species.Comparisons between groupsDolphins have the highest brain-to-body weight ratio of all cetaceans.[7] Along with them, primates and elephants have the highest value among mammals. Monitor lizards, tegus and anoles and some tortoise species have the largest among reptiles. Among birds, the most intelligent are parrots, crows, magpies, jays and ravens. Among amphibians, the studies are still limited but thus far there are no remarkably intelligent species in this class. Either octopuses[8] or jumping spiders[9] have some of the highest for an invertebrate, although some antspecies have 14%-15% of their mass in their brains, the highest value known for any animal. Sharks have one of the highest for fish alongside manta rays (although the electrogenic elephantfish has a ratio nearly 100 times higher - about 1/34, which is slightly higher than that for humans).[10] The tiny shrew, which holds about 10% of its body mass in its brain, has one of the highest brain-to-body mass ratio of any vertebrate.It is a trend that the larger the animal gets, the smaller the brain-to-body mass ratio. Large whales have very small brains compared to their weight, and small rodents like mice have a relatively large brain, giving the same brain-to-body mass ratio as a human.[1]One explanation could be that as an animal's brain gets larger, the size of the neural cells remains the same, and more nerve cells will cause the brain to increase in size to a lesser degree than the rest of the body. This phenomenon has been called the encephalization quotient; E = CS2, where E and S are body and brain weights and C is the cephalization factor.[8] Just focusing on the relationship between the body and the brain is not enough; one also has to consider the total size of the animal.In the essay "Bligh's Bounty",[11] Stephen Jay Gould noted that if one looks at vertebrates with very low encephalization quotient, their brains are slightly less massive than their spinal cords. Theoretically, intelligence might correlate with the absolute amount of brain an animal has after subtracting the weight of the spinal cord from the brain. This formula is useless for invertebrates because they do not have spinal cords, or in some cases, central nervous systems." Also that footage is from all different locations, the Lion and Hyena are from the Kevin Richardson experiment which the hyena completely outperformed the Lion if I remember correctly and I'm not sure where the Leopard one was and the tiger was obviously a different captive situation. Here's another Tiger performing the same feat on it's first try You can't stamp an assumption off of one test regardless, you need a large sample size and array of tests to make any assumptions like that and even then, measuring intelligence for animals that have no idea they are taking a test is difficult. |
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