This is a scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

There's a well-known conspiracy of ravens. That's what you call a group of ravens, that's what you call a group of ravens, that likes to hang out near a zoo in the Austrian Alps.

Every day these ravens conspire to steal the food that's set out for the wild boars there.

So we had a really great opportunity to really watch those individuals daily.

University of Vienna, cognitive biologist Marcus Buckley.

He spends lots of time ignoring the zoo animals and watching the ravens.

What we found is that every time they come, they do those food calls which are very typical for the ravens,

then they are close to potentially dangerous food resources.

The ravens use these calls to recruit their buddies to show up, both to reduce potential dangers from predators, and to overpower dominant ravens who might be trying to hoard all the food for themselves.

But Booklana's colleagues began to suspect the calls revealed other information.

So we had the feeling we could say, this is a juvenile, this a sub-adulant this is most probably an adult just by listening to the cause

If the researchers could use the cause to distinguish among ravens then perhaps the ravens themselves could do so too

So Bookla and his team recorded the calls of around a hundred known individuals, all of which

had been previously catalogued by weight, age, and sex, and were identifiable by colored leg man's.

The researchers combined that data with the acoustic properties of their calls and dumped everything

into a computer program. And as they suspected there were differences in the frequency,

duration, and amplitude of the calls that could sort the ravens according to sex and age.

The results were published in the Journal of Frontiers and Zoology.

So the benefit is, and especially for birds like ravens who travel long distances every day, that

whenever you encounter a new individual or listen to a new

individual you already are able to categorize one of the birds just based on

their calls so this really helps you to assess whether you're going to be in an aggressive situation

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