Goffin's cockatoos can create and manipulate new tools

According to a study published November 7, 2018 in the open access journal, Goffin's cockatoo can tear the carton into long strips to reach food, but do not allow to adjust the width of the strips to fit with narrow openings. PLOS ONE by A.M.I. Auersperg of the University of Medicine Vienna, Austria, and his colleagues.

The cockatoos of Goffin (Cacatua goffiniana) is a type of parrot. Captive goffins are able to invent and manipulate tools, even if they are not known to use tools in the usual way. The authors of this study have examined two questions: Does Goffins adjust the properties of the tool to save effort, and if so, how accurately can it adjust the dimensions of the tool? 39, tool for the task? The authors provided six adult cockatoos with large strips of cardboard to tear into strips as a tool for the test apparatus: a food platform with food reward placed at varying distances (4 to 16 cm) behind a small opening whose width also varied).

They discovered that the Goffin were able to adjust the length of their cardboard tape tools to account for variations in distance between foods, making the tools shorter when the reward was closer than when it was placed farther away. . In any case, if a first attempt tool was too short, the second attempt tool would be much longer. On average, the six birds made tools much longer than necessary to obtain the reward in all test conditions, as birds tend to produce longer and longer tools as the progress of the test progresses. 39, study, perhaps as a strategy of risk avoidance.

However, only one bird was able to create a tool close enough to get the food reward when the opening was the closest. The authors hypothesized that the shearing technique used by birds to tear cardboard limits the narrowness of the resulting bands. The authors suggest that future studies provide less restrictive materials to evaluate whether the Goffins are cognitively able to adjust the width of the tool in this situation.

Alice Auersperg adds: "The way in which they inserted and cast differently manufactured parts of specific lengths according to conditions suggested that cockatoo could adjust their behavior with regard to the manufacture of tools in the intended direction, but with certain limits of precision. . "

Explore further:
Cockatoos keep their tools safe

More information:
Auersperg AMI, Köck C, O & # 39; Hara M, Huber L (2018) The manufacture of cockatoos allows to adjust the lengths but not the widths of the tools. PLoS ONE 13 (11): e0205429. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205429