

Rooks reveal remarkable tool use - tdonia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8059688.stm

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Adlai
Interesting. I'm curious to know whether the rooks improved in their abilities
to use and craft "tools" as they encountered subsequent experiments, or
whether their performance remained roughly constant.

The rook seems very hesitant in the first experiments shown, but in the last
two videos, it seemed much more confident. One possible reason for the lack of
hesitation in the "metatool" experiment is that the rook seemed to watch
closely as the scientist set up the trapdoors, and might have been already
formulating a plan ahead of time.

I think that if that's the case, then the rook has a pretty high level of
sophistication -- more than if it was just using trial-and-error to figure out
the right combination of stones.

~~~
jnorthrop
I also wonder whether they can work in teams. For that matter I wonder if
chimpanzees and crows (the other "tool users" mentioned in the article) work
in teams.

Interesting stuff.

~~~
Adlai
Chimps are very social animals. Ironically, one of their great cooperative
activities is similar to that of humans: namely, killing eachother.

From what I've learned about evolution, and "selfish gene" theory, it seems as
though cooperation pervades social animal societies. According to this page
[1], and the Wikipedia article on rooks, they seems to flock together. I
wouldn't be surprised if further study reveals some cooperative behaviour.

[1] <http://www.first-nature.com/birds/corvus_frugilegus.htm>

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dazzawazza
Without knowing how many times the Rook has tried to solve the problems in the
videos it's hard to judge.

It would be nice to see the Rooks failing and learning from their mistakes and
trying new tactics. Did the rooks just 'know' they could make a hook from wire
and lift up the treat? I doubt it.

Interesting none the less. Makes Hitchcock's The Birds seem a little more
scary.

~~~
thorax
Well, it did say this in the article:

> But in this study, three of the four rooks spontaneously created the hook in
> their first trial.

Boggles the mind a bit.

------
tdonia
related:

Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows

[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)

w/

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840>

Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8787802...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028)

w/

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409609>

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ajb
I do think this is fascinating. However, perhaps we ought to have expected a
flying creature to have rather good spatial reasoning skills...

~~~
Adlai
I'd disagree... look at flying insects. Occasionally, a bee flies into my
house through an open window. It often tries to fly through closed windows
afterwards, suggesting that it is unable to perceive a transparent solid.

Also, there's the cliched moth flying into a candle/lightbulb. Birds and bats,
however, don't do that.

Speaking of bats -- it might be interesting to see similar experiments
studying bats' reasoning abilities. Does "seeing" the world through SONAR make
them reason differently from birds (or us)?

~~~
stcredzero
Birds do fly into windows -- once. I've seen it happen sitting inside the
sliding glass doors that open onto the patio of my parent's house. They either
don't survive the event, or they learn.

Flying insects don't learn as well. They mostly have hardwired programs that
work well for them most of the time.

