
Scientists Have Found Another Species of Crow That Uses Tools - okket
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-crow-nearly-died-out-before-we-knew-it-uses-tools/499724/?single_page=true
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redwards510
> Also, every year, the zoo staff try to weigh the birds by baiting a weighing
> scale with fruit—and the crows would often foil them by just raking the
> fruit off with a stick.

This sounds like evidence of a playful sense of humor, unless there was a
different reason the crows didn't want to get on the scale!

They say tool use is a sign of intelligence, but it is probably more accurate
(and intriguing) to say it is a sign of a higher level of consciousness. Using
a tool means you are not just running on pure instinct, reacting to the
environment. The crows see those inaccessible grubs and think "Cant get that
food. But _I_ can use this stick to poke them!"

I am fascinated by crows and have begun carrying a ziploc bag of peanuts
around in my car in case I stumble across any. They are extremely wary birds
(unlike seagulls), so you have to be very subtle in how you feed them. At
first I would just throw the peanuts in their direction, which scared them.
This can be really bad if you do it with crows near your house because they
remember faces and share that knowledge with others, so one incident can make
you a "bad person" for a long time!

~~~
lisper
> it is probably more accurate (and intriguing) to say it is a sign of a
> higher level of consciousness

More intriguing certainly, more accurate is debatable. Robots can be (and have
been) programmed to use tools. That doesn't mean they are conscious. Ants are
very sophisticated farmers [1], but they almost certainly are not conscious.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/ants-are-
destroying-y...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/ants-are-destroying-
your-plants-by-nurturing-perfect-aphid-colonies/)

~~~
flukus
> but they almost certainly are not conscious.

Not individually no. But individual consciousness may not be the only kind.

~~~
lisper
That depends on what you mean by "individual consciousness." Unitarity seems
to be one of the inherent characteristics of human consciousness, which is the
only unambiguous example of consciousness that we have. Humans can only
consciously attend to one thing at a time. We don't know whether this is a
_necessary_ feature of consciousness or merely a human limitation (because we
only have one data point), but my money is on the former.

This is not to say that consciousness could not exist in a physically
distributed system like an ant colony, but the colony would still perceive
itself as "an individual" (whatever that could possibly mean in that case).

~~~
Retric
Consciousness as commonly defined is kind of a low bar, companies for example
could be said to be conscious and meet most definitions that doin't boil down
to is Human. But, frankly we already have a word for 'Human' so defining such
things in purely human terms seems pointless.

~~~
lisper
I will happily accept the idea that companies are life forms, but conscious? I
dunno. What is the evidence?

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M_Grey
At some point we're going to have to take something like responsibility for
our actions in the face of other sentient species... Or accept that we do
things only because we can, and abandon even the semblance of ethics. It's
starting to become very clear even with a strong degree of skepticism, that
while we may be the most advanced intelligence on Earth, we're not the only
ones.

That _should_ have implications for our species, if we let it.

~~~
coliveira
Humans don't respect even their own species, good luck with respect for other
sentient species...

~~~
eanzenberg
Neither do other animals...? We're not all that different.

~~~
wavefunction
Most other animals won't fight to the death. They might fight far enough to
determine a victor, but usually the fight or conflict is over quickly or
before the conflict actually takes place.

Humans on the other hand will pursue the illogical course of self-destruction
for the slight chance of "moral victory."

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yumraj
We have a birdbath in our front yard. A few weeks ago I saw a crow which had
~2 inch long piece of something which looked like dried white bread in its
beak. As I watched it from inside, it moved around the birdbath on the
railings, very carefully, for sometime, making sure that there was no danger.
Then, it sat on the edge of the birdbath and dropped the piece in water -
waited 1-2 seconds and picked it up and then ate it.

I'm really bummed that I didn't capture it on video but to me it was a sign of
intelligence that the crow knew that it could soften that piece of bread by
dipping in water so that it could eat it.

~~~
flukus
I used to work near one that someone would throw bread out for. It would make
a hole in the slice then put it around it's neck and fly off to eat it.

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Symmetry
It was recently discovered that birds, like primates, have a number of neurons
in their brains that scales linearly with brain volume.

[http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full)

That's pretty impressive in the animal kingdom.

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lossolo
I've heard about crows that take a nut to the street, leave it on street, wait
for a car to get over it then wait for red light and get the nut. Such an
intelligence in such a small brain, incredible.

~~~
tzs
Small brains, but corvid and parrot brains have a higher neuron density, with
neuron counts comparable to non-human primates such as apes, so it is not too
surprising that they can be pretty smart.

I think the most interesting thing about their intelligence is that their
brains do not have a prefrontal cortex, which for mammals (including humans)
is where much of what we associate with intelligence occurs.

In birds they have a region called the nidopallium in the mid part of the
brain that handles those things.

Our last common ancestor with birds was something that lived before the
dinosaurs, and would have had little or no higher level cognitive abilities.
It would have been operating almost entirely on instinct. It had neither a
prefrontal cortex nor a nidopallium. Intelligence did not evolve in birds and
mammals until after they split from that common ancestor.

So what we have with intelligence in birds and intelligence in mammals is
parallel evolution. With other mammals that are intelligent, such as whales,
dolphins, non-human primates, pigs, dogs, etc., they have brains that are
essentially the same architecture as ours. We've just got a better
implementation. Intelligent birds, on the other hand, are a different
architecture.

~~~
joeyo
I think this is what you're getting at, but the really interesting question
regarding corvid intelligence (in my opinion) is whether their pallium
implements the same or similar _computations_ and uses the same or similar
_representations_ as mammalian neocortex. Clearly because of the different
evolutionary origin there are structural/architectural differences (eg pallium
is nucleated rather than laminated), but maybe there is only a single
computational "solution" to the problem of general intelligence. To pose it as
a question: does avian pallium solve problems in similar ways/using similar
algorithms as mammalian cortex or did its early divergence allow it to find
different solutions? I think the answer to this, whichever way it breaks, will
have pretty big implications for AI generally.

Same story goes for Cephalopods.

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ori_b
The interesting part for me is this:

> _The captive adults all did so spontaneously and exactingly. Rutz even
> tested seven recently hatched chicks, which had never used sticks before and
> had no chances to observe tool-proficient adults. Their human keepers had
> been briefed to never use tools in front of them._

> _And yet, when confronted with a weekly baited log, all the chicks picked up
> nearby objects and tried their luck at probing._

I'm very curious how much of the tool use is instinctive, how well they
generalize to other situations, and how they learn and pass on concepts.

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MichaelMoser123
There is an interesting popular book on Ethology by Frans De Waal.

“Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?”

[https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-
Animals/dp/0393...](https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-
Animals/dp/0393246183)

Here is a great review of this book
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-
anim...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-animals-
think/476364/?single_page=true)

the passage that got me hooked: “a better way to think about other creatures
would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds
of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Children and chimps and crows
and octopuses are ultimately so interesting not because they are mini-mes, but
because they are aliens—not because they are smart like us, but because they
are smart in ways we haven’t even considered"

for example different species have different approaches to problem solving:
Chimpanzees try to comprehend/model a problem while Monkeys are solving tool
building problems by trial and error (that's from the book)

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raddad
In the 70's in high school we saw a film where a crow dropped pebbles into a
glass of water in order to raise the level of water so it could get a drink.

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fl0wenol
I was under the impression just as the scientists at the reserve in Hawaii
that the tool use was more common than in just the broad-faced island crows.

Also, I'm rooting for the captive alalā population to grow more robust. I
enjoy living in proximity to crows and hate to hear of them struggling.

~~~
digi_owl
Well there is a video online of an European crow playing with a jar lid on a
snow covered rooftop.

I think it comes down to what we define as "tool use".

~~~
matt_kantor
Here's the video: [https://youtu.be/mRnI4dhZZxQ](https://youtu.be/mRnI4dhZZxQ)

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lamarkia
If humans were to grow up without social structure or education, they would
not be very effective at survival. It is due to learning skills through
education, etc that makes humans effective.

What we have here is specific populations of corvid species that grew up in
relative isolation/protection that enabled them to have social structure to
exist between generations.

It should be feasible to influence other corvid populations to show such
remarkable feats. As long as there is no big mortality, the younger birds
should learn from the older.

~~~
eridius
Did you read the article? They tested newly-hatched chicks that had never seen
a tool be used, and the chicks still instinctively tried to use tools (though
they were clumsy at first, and gained skill at using the tools over a few
months).

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joering2
The ending of the video is interesting -- while first Crow helped another, the
second one that got the food out of the hole didn't share it. The first did
not do anything other than help the second one once again... and again didn't
get the food.

Wonder if it means that the might be very skilled but also can be very dumb?

~~~
MaulingMonkey
"Fine Bob, you can have that one... again? Damn it Bob, stop being an
asshole."

People can be that "dumb", I wouldn't read too much into it.

Also it looked like the "first" bird "stole" the stick from the "second" bird
in the first place, so it could just be some well deserved payback ;)

~~~
marcosdumay
Bird commerce would be much more interesting than tool usage. AFAIK, we are
the only species that does it.

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SurrealSoul
How many more years until we can arm the crows and start a private bird
militia?

~~~
digi_owl
I seem to recall a WW2 project that tried to use either birds or bats as
carriers for incendiary devices.

The project was canceled after one or more buildings on the base they were
being trained burned down.

~~~
wp1
Pigeons and bats were both used in separate projects. You're thinking of the
bat one.

Incendiaries were attached to bats, who were dropped from planes. And then
expected to fly into buildings. Incendiaries go off. Building burns down.

Pigeons were used as the guidance system in an early smart bomb. Rather than
tracking a target with a laser or GPS, trained pigeons would steer the bomb.

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jarmitage
I don't understand why this genre of news still frames this as surprise...

Have scientists found a species of crow (or other probably-more-sentient-than-
we-realised species) that DOES NOT use tools? That would be surprising

~~~
int_19h
As the article points out, only one species of crow was previously known to be
capable of using tools, and many others were explicitly known to not be
capable.

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andrewflnr

      ...and some even modified their tools to improve them.
    

Dang. I think they may have buried the lede. I wish they had more details on
this.

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avodonosov
Building nests - is it a use of tools?

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conistonwater
I found it confusing, but it's a crow _species_ , not just one crow.

~~~
sctb
OK, we've updated the submission title.

