
Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money - robg
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028
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nirmal
The TED Talk mentioned:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intel...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html)

Or a link to the MP4 version:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/download/video/4555/talk/...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/download/video/4555/talk/261)

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thomasmallen
Crows are technically the most intelligent birds, but people expect parrots to
be due to their speech capabilities.

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zack
From Wikipedia:

Intelligence

As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, and Aesop's
fable of The Crow and the Pitcher shows that humans have long viewed the crow
as an intelligent animal. Crows and ravens often score very highly on
intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale. Crows in the
northwestern U.S. show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay
information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies
involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an
intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens. Wild hooded
crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing. Crows will
engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking
order.

One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied
recently because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the
day-to-day search for food, including dropping seeds into a heavy trafficked
street and waiting for a car to crush them open. On October 5, 2007,
researchers from the University of Oxford, England presented data acquired by
mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. It turned
out that they use a larger variety of tools than previously known, plucking,
smoothing and bending twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of
foodstuffs. Crows in Queensland Australia have learned how to eat the toxic
cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the
throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic
innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.

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12ren
Crows "finding" money is problematic, as it might not be "lost"...
intelligence (evolution, flow of water, etc) has a way of finding the shortest
path. It seems tricky to specify the goal clearly, so the crows are trained to
find only "lost" money. Perhaps only reward them for coins that were on the
ground? As opposed to in someone's pocket, purse, on a shop counter, in a cash
register, in a bank... hmm, this experiment could end badly.

Crows more intelligent than monkeys, he claims in the following (1 min) video.
Could that be true?
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/03/taking_over_the_...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/03/taking_over_the_world_one_crow_1.html)

 _We try to kill off adaptive pests like roaches, rats and crows, but we're
breeding them to be parasites ... a better goal ... is to seek an interspecies
harmony._

Lovely idea! Reminds me of how parasites became symbiotes, then integrated, as
has been argued for some cellular machinery (eg mitochondria and chloroplasts)
by Lynn Margulis: <http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3IIWSOA7G9YKL> . It also
reminds me of "The Evolution of Cooperation" _Axelrod_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation>

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zeynel
Very interesting. Thanks for the TED link. But is there a reason why he is not
showing an actual crow dropping a coin in the box? All he shows is a drawing
and then he describes what happens.

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seiji
Students who captured crows for tagging the first time were continually
harrassed by the birds afterwards.

Now when students capture birds for tagging they wear masks and hats.

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12ren
linked TED talk: "Can we domesticate germs?"
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_do...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs.html)

I think there's no reason for infections to be harmful. Why not an infection
that benefits the host? Some do, for examples the bacteria in your gut, that
help you digest food.

How could we hack the environment to favour beneficial infections?

