Do Animals, Like People, Favor One Side?

Dec. 12 -- Most people are right-handed, but what about other animals?

A growing body of evidence suggests that chimps, rhesus monkeys, cockatoos, humpback whales and even toads favor one hand, paw, claw or fin over the other. And now it appears another animal, the crow, or at least one species of crow, may be predominantly oriented to the right like people.

Right-Eyed Tool-Makers

The clues are in the elaborate hooking tools the famously clever New Caledonian crow crafts for poking into trees' crevices and yanking out spiders, millipedes, larvae and cockroaches.

This species of crow, which populates the island of Grand Terre, New Caledonia (a Pacific island east of Australia) manufactures the tools from leaf twigs and from the long, stiff narrow leaf of the pandanus tree.

When animal psychologist Gavin Hunt analyzed the tools and markings on leaf remnants left behind after the crows had cut away their instruments, he was able to determine if the birds had used their bills to cut the tool from left to right or from right to left. As he reports in this week's journal of Nature, the vast majority of the nearly 4,000 leaves sampled indicated the birds cut much more often from left to right.

To Hunt that suggests the birds mostly use their right eyes to guide their work as they carved out their instruments. And he points out activities carried out on the right are usually directed by the left hemisphere of the brain.

That scenario rings familiar with people who are predominantly right-handed (and right-eyed and right-legged) and whose language speaking hardware is located in the left side of the brain.

Since energy is a premium in nature, scientists have suggested that people evolved to host their motor and speaking tools on one side the brain to streamline development. The same could be true for the crows.

"Just as people appear to have developed a specialization in the left side of the brain for language, these crows seem to have a specialization on their left side for tool making," said Hunt, who is based at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.