
An Orangutan Learns to Fish - benbreen
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/orangutan-learns-fish
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jcrites
For those interested in animal intelligence, I recommend watching "A Murder of
Crows", a short documentary about crow intelligence that's available free
online. [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-
crows/in...](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-
crows/introduction/5838/)

Crows are one of the only other animals that can make and use tools. In fact,
crows probably spend more time building their tools than any other animal than
humans; they carefully clip the limbs from a tree branch, whittle it down, and
fashion it into an effective hook. The documentary also shows some
intelligence tests in which crows perform almost as well as human children.

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cfontes
Minor commment, in that page they state that crows live everywhere except
antartica.

But I've never seen one in south america (traveled a bit around there) and it
looks like wikipedia haven't as well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(genus)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_\(genus\))

~~~
navanit
Good point. While the family Corvidae (Corvids, which includes Jays) is found
in South America, the genus Corvus ("Crows") is absent there. So for PBS to be
correct you have to read "Crows" as "the Crow family".

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GrantS
PBS aired a fascinating documentary earlier this year about an orangutan that
was taught sign language in the 70s by being raised on a college campus as a
"human child", explores both the personal side and ethical issues. I was
surprised I had never heard of him, and even more surprised to find that he
now lives at the zoo a few miles from my house. I had no idea.

Video here, I'm not sure if this plays outside the US:
[http://video.pbs.org/video/2365286726/](http://video.pbs.org/video/2365286726/)

~~~
kqr2
Project Nim was very similar except Nim was a chimpanzee.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814836](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814836)

Unfortunately, it doesn't really have a happy ending and brings up a lot of
ethical issues.

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coltr
"Forest Person", that's cool. I found it funny that I automatically assumed
"Learns to fish" meant our 'advanced' version of fishing, but I guess catching
fish and eating it in any way is still fishing.

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brianbreslin
The fact that they are even smarter makes their being wiped out so quickly
even more troubling. We are just scratching the surface of what we can learn
of these majestic apes. In indonesia their habitat is being destroyed for palm
oil harvesting.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan)

[http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/deforesta...](http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/deforestation/forest_conversion_agriculture/orang_utans_palm_oil/)

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mjbrownie
I've had the good fortune of visiting Camp Leakey with primatologist Leif
Cocks of the orangutan project
([http://orangutan.org.au](http://orangutan.org.au)) and they are every bit as
intelligent and mischievous as described.

An important side note to this article is that (despite this observed fishing
behavior) Orangutans swim, in his words, "like bricks". This leads to a lot of
sub speciation either side of river systems and sadly makes migration
difficult in what scraps are left of their habitat.

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chumba_wamba
That's awesome.

