I always find it intriguing when people talk about animal intelligence without first providing a basic definition of the way they define intelligence. I'm a psychology doctoral student, and intelligence assessment falls within the realm of my discipline, so suffice it to say that I've been involved in more than one philosophical debate as to what the proper definition of intelligence is. In humans, the trend is currently a belief in "multiple intelligences," such as social intelligence, emotional intelligence (often called EQ), artistic or imaginitive intelligence, and of course the traditional verbal and nonverbal cognitive intelligence generally measured on IQ tests.
Animal intelligence, with the exception of higher mammals such as dolphins and great apes, can probably not be defined in remotely the same way. However, regardless of the species we are talking about, including humans, I think the most useful definition of intelligence I've come across is that an organism is intelligent inasmuch as it can survive and adapt in its environment. If most of us were thrown into the middle of a rain forest, we'd be blithering idiots, regardless of what a Stanford-Binet IQ test tells us. Most animals have evolved to be especially suited to a particular environment, and therefore possess some "intelligence," whether we call it instinct or brains or whatever.
I think a useful measure of an animal's relative intelligence may be the number of those animals in a colony. Ants, for example, have thousands of members in their colonies, but the survival rate for any one ant isn't nearly as high as, say, a group of whales. The whales, therefore, are individually better suited to survive in their environment, and are therefore may be relatively more intelligent (or in that case, maybe just bigger). But this brings up other issues such as group intelligence. Who ever heard of getting rid of an entire colony of roaches, even if each one is individually easy to kill.
So the take-home message I'm trying to say is that intelligence really isn't comparable across dissimilar species such as lizards and birds. It is probably more realistic to compare leachies to ciliatus, for example, if we were going to have a debate about relative intelligences. Otherwise, it's typically useful to look at how well an animal adapts and survives and to consider that a sign of the intelligence the species has evolved.
Rick
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