Appended is what the researchersrs actually said in their paper.
Andrew
"Individual recognition is common within species, and has been
extensively studied through controlled experiments (13). However,
reports of one species recognizing different individuals of
another species are much rarer and generally restricted to social
mammals (14-16) and livestock (17). In birds, previous studies of
interspecific recognition of different individuals are anecdotal
and/or restricted to laboratory settings that lack ecological
relevance (e.g., pigeons in boxes, pecking at projected images)
(18-20). Likewise, honey bees can learn to forage preferentially
under photographs of particular human faces that are associated with
rewards (21), demonstrating the ability of bees to distinguish
between two-dimensional, stationary images of faces, but not
resolving whether they can learn to distinguish between actual
humans. The primary strengths of our study are that it was done on
wild birds and used an experimental approach to measure a behavior
directly linked to fitness (12). Also, it used a far more challenging
task than typical of recognition studies. Birds were not required to
distinguish among a few individuals or images, but rather between
one individual and thousands of others, all of whom were potential
threats and varied in daily appearances"
|