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Let's say there is a hundred dollar bill stuck behind a shelf just in your reach, and next to it is a set of TinkerToys. Even a toddler could probably assemble some sticks to recover the addition. But what about an animal? A particularly intelligent raven species seems to have solved this problem alone.
Caledonian crows are very gifted in intelligence, known for their game and advanced skills in tool making. But a new article shows that the birds demonstrate a tool-making behavior observed previously only in humans and captive monkeys: they assembled new tools from components.
"We wanted to know how inventive they are, they can solve a new problem that they usually do not meet by assembling components in order to achieve them," studied author Auguste von Bayern of the Max-Planck Ornithological Institute of Oxford told Gizmodo. "They really test their creative ability."
The scientists started with eight New Caledonian crows caught in the wild. First, they presented the ravens with a transparent box containing food on a track, which, if pushed to the end, would come out of the box. They also provided wooden pegs long enough to reach the food and push it along the trail. This familiarized the crows with the task. Next, the researchers placed the food out of reach of the studs and combinable pieces scattered on the ground near the crows and on an older tool – cylindrical pieces that fit into each other to create a tool more long.
Four of the birds (named Tumult, Taboo, Mango and Jungle) managed to create a longer tool from the pieces to recover food. Three of the birds were again able to solve the problem at later trials, but Mango, "a seemingly fluctuating motive bird," declined to participate in these follow-ups, according to the study published in Scientific Reports . The other four continued to aim for food with the short stems and were disqualified.
The researchers continued to subject the birds to this type of testing, but when the food was out of reach of a two-component tool, only Mango knew what to do: he made tools in three or four parts. It turns out that he was motivated enough to surpass his peers. The results presented here "match and surpass the current evidence for this ability in non-human primates," the authors write.
Of course, this is a small study that does not observe birds in the wild (although Caledonian crows are well-known users of tools that make hooks for food). But it is still "really astonishing" that the birds have understood the relatively complex task. "It's not surprising that chimpanzees can do things similar to human children," von Bayern said, "but finding such feats from distant relatives suggests that they have developed their cognitive abilities independently."
The researchers are ultimately interested in the evolution of intelligence and the effects of ecological factors on the evolution of cognitive abilities.
Who knows what birds will learn to build next? Especially Mango. Watch out for him.
[Scientific Reports]Source link
