Richard Collins: Do parrots live longer because they are intelligent?

According to the ‘cognitive buffer hypothesis’, an intelligent creature is better able to cope with ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune’ than a less intelligent one

A macaw, in South America, can hope to celebrate its thirtieth birthday.

Cookie, a Major Mitchell’s cockatoo, died at Brookfield Zoo near Chicago in 2016. Having reached the ripe old age of 88, he was recognised by Guinness World Records as the longest-lived member of the entire parrot family. Cockatoos survive better than other birds of their size but why they do so is a bit of a mystery. In a paper just published, scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour examine the factors affecting parrot lifespan.

To make reliable estimates of longevity, the researchers needed very large amounts of life-history data. Records of 133,818 parrots were obtained from over a thousand zoos. By analysing these, the life expectancies of 217 of the world’s 356 parrot species were calculated.