Do Woodpeckers Get Brain Damage like NFL Players? Contributed by @donkeypong

In a recent post on my blog, I discussed some of the challenges facing the National Football League (NFL) in the United States (though that was one heck of a great Superbowl game!). One of these challenges is the revelation that most former football players show signs of a brain ailment called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The most easily detectable signs of CTE are a buildup of tau proteins in a certain region of the brain. It seems to result from head trauma, which is a fact of life in a hard-hitting sport like American football.

CTE is a degenerative brain disease, the symptoms of which can include behavioral issues, mood changes, and problems with thinking. Over time, it can turn into dementia. Some former football players cannot remember their own names and others have committed suicide.

Source: Boston Herald.

In another recent (unrelated) post, I published some photos I had taken of bare tree branches during winter. When the leaves are gone, anything that’s hidden up there for the rest of the year becomes exposed, such as birds’ nests and mistletoe. In that post, I also included a short video I had taken of a woodpecker up in one of the trees. The woodpeckers in my area stay through the winter because they store nuts to eat.

These so-called Acorn Woodpeckers make holes in trees and then stuff them with acorns and other nuts. Some woodpeckers also make deep holes until some tree sap fills the holes. It’s sweet and sticky and entraps insects, which then become another source of food.

Here’s a brief national Geographic video clip showing how they do this (and the footage is much better than mine):

One thing all woodpeckers seem to have in common: they hit their heads like hammers against hard tree wood for much of their waking lives.

Can woodpeckers suffer head trauma like football players?

I had never thought about this before, but it joins together two threads from those blog posts. A news article today brought to my attention that researchers have been studying woodpecker brains. One motivation for this is to find out if they have any trauma from banging their heads against trees all day long.

It turns out that woodpecker brains have the same indicator that football players’ brains have: the tau protein buildup. Woodpeckers’ brains are full of it. Researchers tested a number of different woodpeckers’ brains and also those of other birds. Only the woodpeckers had this CTE-related buildup.

Woody Woodpecker cartoon from Warner Bros.

Somehow, hitting one’s head (or getting hit in the head) repeatedly creates a buildup of this protein. And so, the technical answer to the question posed by the title of this post is "yes". Woodpeckers do get brain damage. But is that protein buildup a bad thing?

Do woodpeckers get CTE?

Not so fast. These birds are well adapted to their lifestyle of using their heads like jackhammers. Scientists do not know yet if there are any problems with woodpecker brains beyond the fact that they contain lots of these proteins. In fact, one researcher suggested that it may even have a protective effect in their brains.

Bird brains are not like human brains. Human brains can move around a lot. They float around inside fluid within the skull. So when the human head is involved in collisions and violent hits, the brain can be shaken. If the CTE suffered by football players is any indication (being found in nearly all former NFL players), then the human brain is not well suited to withstand that kind of repeated violence.

Woodpeckers’ brains are much different. They are wrapped around the skull’s support structure. The birds’ tongues are so long that they wrap around the brain, supported by an unusual structure of bones. And the skull’s bones are spongy, with a mesh called trabeculae, so they serve as a shock absorber. The brain itself is confined in a tight space, so that it does not move too much.

This isn’t to say that those little bird brained creatures are not brain damaged. A few years ago, one of them hitched a car ride in Chicago looking quite stunned, for example. Here is the video.

But these birds have evolved into their niche and many generations of them have successfully hammered their heads against hard wood. So they may be better adapted to this violence than we are. There is still a lot that scientist don’t understand about birds’ brains (or human ones, for that matter). Only with time and more research will we know for sure.

Sources:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/02/woodpeckers-show-possible-brain-damage-like-football-players/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2016/01/06/bird-brains-why-dont-woodpeckers-get-concussions/#611099f4256b

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy

http://mentalfloss.com/article/30731/why-dont-woodpeckers-get-brain-damage

Top photo: Pileated Woodpecker, Creative Commons via Wikipedia by Lorax.