Sick animals struggle to solve problems and adapt to changing environments

July 21 () –

Cognitive and disease ecologists have analyzed how Impaired learning, memory, or decision-making associated with infection can affect the adaptation of animals such as birds and bees to urbanization or climate change. They have found that sick animals struggle to solve problems and adapt to changing environments, they report in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

“Cognitive decline could contribute to population declines, particularly for species that rely heavily on learning and memory for foraging or other important functions“, Explain the authors, including professors Dana Hawley and Kendra Sewall, from Virginia Tech, and Anne Leonard, from the University of Nevada, both in the United States.

“Impaired cognitive performance could compromise the ability of some animals to exploit urbanized and other rapidly changing habitats, where problem solving may be particularly important,” they add.

The impact of diseases on cognitive abilities can vary greatly from one animal to another, depending on the animal’s survival strategy and how the pathogen or parasite manifests itself in the body. For example, social animals, such as ants and humans, may miss out on learning opportunities by avoiding high-risk areas or individuals, a behavior called “disgust landscape”“.

Infections early in life could also make animals more susceptible. For example, young canaries that are infected with Plasmodium when they are learning to sing might have a reduced song repertoire and complexity as adults. Impairment could also arise indirectly as a result of malnutrition or the animal’s own immune response.

“A challenge in all cognitive ecology studies is the paucity of comparable data across taxa,” the authors write. To understand how infection affects specific cognitive abilities, it will be necessary to investigate a broader range of hosts and pathogens, focus on analogous aspects of cognition (eg, spatial learning; problem solving; general vs. specialized cognitive abilities), and standardize experimental paradigms where possible”.