Scientists Have Found Another Species of Crow That Uses Tools | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Have Found Another Species of Crow That Uses Tools

theatlantic.com

198 pointsokket106 comments

> 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!

> They are extremely wary birds (unlike seagulls), so you have to be very subtle in how you feed them.

They also know where you looking at, and they don't like to be inspected too hard. It passed a month before the crows near my house would get near the food I left with me still present.

Nowadays they fly by at centimeters of my head and stay within meters for hours. Keep it up, is very rewarding.

I concur. I have had ravens & have currently grackles on my property. They are smart & playful once your presence is tolerated. Harris Hawks are also fascinating & tolerant if you get to know them young.

> At first I would just throw the peanuts in their direction, which scared them

What should one do instead?

Throw away from you and them, at about 90°. stand so arm movement is obstructed by your body. don't expect much first couple times. they'll get what you threw after you're gone and make a connection.

I used to sit out back and feed the squirrels, and a couple of blue jays learned what I was doing by observation. Although they never got as close as the squirrels (which were almost hand-tame within a few weeks), they did warm up quite a bit and didn't even freak out when their babies were hopping around right next to me. Maybe the same proxy method would work with crows if there are any willing squirrels in the neighborhood.

Haha, I always fed the local squirrels as a kid. I tried petting one once. The little bastard went into a chattering rage and chased me down the street. To the amusement of several neighbors.

> 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...

On the contrary, I wouldn't say robots use anything because that implies a conscious actor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Correct.

> but they almost certainly are not conscious.

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

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).

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.

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

> Robots can be (and have been) programmed to use tools.

If the crows had been programmed to do likewise rather than generating the plan themselves then I'd agree with you. Contrariwise, if the robots had just been left with an item just out of reach, a directive to grasp the item, and a stick left lying in reach, and had come up with a plan to use the stick as an arm extension on their own then that would be a different matter.

"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"

One reason could be that they realize they will get more fruit if they postpone getting on the scales for a while.

> 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!

I'd say it's about the scale. If it had a smooth metal/plastic surface the crow might not want to stand on it, or be put off by the reflection or something along those lines.

Perhaps they learned that if they steal the fruit without getting into the scale, they get a second piece.

I think this kind of tool use is just evolutionarily developed instinctive behavior. It's not much of an extension of the nearly universal bird behavior of gathering sticks to build a nest. A spider weaves an amazingly symetrical, evenly spaced orb web. That takes a lot of manual dexterity, awareness of distances, where good anchor points are, etc. But a spider has no intelligence.

> But a spider has no intelligence.

I wouldn't dismiss them so quickly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_%28spider%29

http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Sinclair%20ZX80%20spide...

We do things because they please us, and avoid things because they displease us. That pleasure and displeasure is the expression of our intrinsic nature. Is it possible that instinctive behaviors in animals, rather than being robotic motions, are the result of a similar pleasure drive? Is it possible that the spider has an aesthetic sensibility with regard to web building, much like we have with art?

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.

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

Depressing, but no less true for that.

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

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."

Animals have not created the concept of "wealth" and "money" to justify the death of other animals. In this regard, other animals are way ahead of our species.

Most of us actually do. Not all humans respect all other humans all the time, but most of the time we behave quite decently against each other.

The way you're thinking about things is very natural in the realm of computers and math, but insane in life at large.

We do not follow universal, perfect rules. Humans make judgements on what is appropriate or not based on preference.

It would be perfectly in keeping with sanity and normal behavior to decide something is worth the regrettable extinction of an intelligent species, while maintaining actual codes of morality.

What's the value in extinguishing intelligent species? Otherwise you're right, but it's not in keeping with the professed morality that the vast majority of the public appears to claim to follow. As I said, it might be time to simply admit that our overriding ethic is, "Because we can."

> What's the value in extinguishing intelligent species?

More resources for us.

What resources are we competing for with crows exactly?

Desirable tropical beachfront property?

Crow condos on the beach... the solution is clearly timeshare.

You think they would fall for free luau tickets and high-pressure sales techniques?

Well... it would be a real test of their intelligence.

It only appears that we do not follow universal, perfect rules because we have so many of them and even different from one individual to other. Our brains are too big to make sense about these rules. But if you take simple variant of brain, insect for example, you see that they pretty much have universal, perfect rules that they follow much like robots.

> Or accept that we do things only because we can, and abandon even the semblance of ethics.

That's not abandoning ethics, just changing them.

The holocaust is something we almost universally consider unethical today, but it was within the nazis ethical framework.

Cannibalism is unethical too, until it's a matter of life and death.

Cannibalism isn't really unethical, it's unsafe. Murdering someone to cannibalize them is very unethical.

Was it? Was the "Nazi ethical framework" actually a framework or just a conveniently half-assed set of pseudo philosophies? Take the "Aryan" concept or their racial "science"; just because someone claims to have a different ethical system isn't reason enough to accept on its face.

Questions I'd ask would be along the lines of questioning whether or not there were actual ethical principles at play, and if so what were they? I'm not sure that racial or national supremacy is really meaningful when you're not the person believing in it. "Race" for example isn't a particularly rigorous concept, so what ethical structures could you build around it?

Then again Hitler banned vivisection, introduced hunting restrictions, required animals to be under aneastetic for slaughter and there were plans to ban slaughter houses after the war altogether.

I feel that only emphasizes how arbitrary and inconsistent any supposed "Nazi Ethics" were.

I know it was not a pleasant system to live in if you did not subscribe to it or fell out of luck and I am personally not fond of the extreme emphasize of race. I feel I have to state this because talking favourably of any aspect of the system is frowned upon.

Anyway, the system overall appears consistent to me: glorifying nature and culture. They have made advances with respect to animal-wellfare and protection of nature that we still benefit from today in that (a) they the raised the bar at the time and (b) the laws introduced then are still in place (when slightly modified).

They also introduced the first of a kind wellfare system for Germans and put a strong emphasis on family.

If you can understand and read German, this is a great documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vtfdfILdAw. It's funny just how much less tainted that documentary is then what we get to see to today.

I think there's a lot of hearsay about Nazi Germany and virtually anything you read on it is tainted either with hatred (99% of us) or fanatism (1%). I used to absolutely hate on the system, because no wonder, we are brought up in school to hate it just based on emotion and bad imagery. If you've read 1984 by George Orwell, going to history class in a way felt like the two minutes of hate. For example, there's plenty of evidence that Hitler did not want a war and tried his best to avoid it, yet in school it was already clear without a doubt that Hitler wanted a war for "world domination" or some none sense like that. Again, if you understand German, this is fantastic: https://www.amazon.de/1939-Krieg-Anlauf-Zweiten-Weltkrieg/dp... and a talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJuvWn7TFdY.

I'm the wrong audience to try and slow-sell this to, but I appreciate the try.

It was easy when sentience was considered binary. There were just 2 groups, man and animals. If not man then not sentient.

Once sentience is considered a continuum, you can say things that we kind of felt all along like "its less morally bad to eat a chicken than a dolphin".

The reason that this meets resistance is because it forces the question "is it morally bad to eat the chicken at all?" and then we have to pick a spot on the continuum as a dividing point. There may be some small disagreement as to where to draw this line...

Sentience being a continuum also suggests that there might be points where man overlaps animals. For example, an adult crow might have more ethical value than a newborn human baby. Taking such a notion seriously would require restructuring a lot of society.

Worse still, some people are more sentient than others. Its a deep rabbit hole that will lead you straight into conflict with many prevailing orthodoxies. Also very easy to abuse to create some very dangerous ideologies. Put some in the chamber of your Godwin accelerator and its damn near hypergolic.

Almost enough to make you shudder and try not to think so much.

It really does, but if we don't do the thinking, someone else will do it for us and come to conclusions we may not like.

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.

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.

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

That's pretty impressive in the animal kingdom.

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.

Video, narrated by David Attenborough: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0

The cleverest crows drop the nuts on the pedestrian crosswalk, so that there is a long safe duration to grab the cracked but.

See also the Portia spider, which is somehow capable of planning ahead and following prey even when it's out of sight.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-sp...

I assume you've read the book Echopraxia?

Nope.

There's a TEDxTalk about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fiAoqwsc9g

22min worth of 22min.

> Such an intelligence in such a small brain, incredible.

With time, we'll come to accept that intelligence has nothing to do with the size of the brain.

Compare the computing power of the processor in the computer you carry in your pocket with the one that powered desktops of a decade ago.

That's because transistors are smaller now than they were a decade ago. In terms of transistor count, modern processors are much bigger than processors were a decade ago.

The question then becomes: Is neuron size constant? Can some animals have smaller neurons?

Transistors were invented last century. Neurons were invented millions years ago, we're most probably near the physical optimum.

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.

How about cephalopods?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

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.

The relative mass of the brain to the body is what really matters. The brain:body mass ratio for a crow is roughly the same as a chimp.

Although we joke about stupid obese Americans, I don't buy that the mass of the body surrounding the brain has any relation to cognitive abilities. Of course you may need a bigger brain to control a body with more muscles (e.g. elephant trunk), but muscle control is quite automatic and has little to do with intelligence.

I was referring to species in general, not specific humans. The encephalization quotient[1] doesn't work quite as well for comparing primates to other primates either.

The encephalization quotient is a fairly reliable way predict general animal intelligence. It's not just some anecdotal evidence. It's obviously not a silver bullet, because there are edge cases it doesn't consider, but the numbers it gives do give a very basic way to tell if a species may have sophisticated cognitive abilities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient

I've witnessed this personally in Budapest (lots and lots of crows on the edge of town during the winter; if corvids ever develop a cultural consciousness I would not be surprised if it wound up speaking Hungarian).

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.

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...

Here is a great review of this book http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-anim...

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)

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.

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.

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".

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/mRnI4dhZZxQ

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.

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).

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?

Perhaps the first one didn't want the food... if it did, it wouldn't have helped the other crow but would instead just have done it on its own and taken the food. After all, if it's able to use the stick to probe on its own, wouldn't it stand to reason that it didn't even need to have helped the other crow except out of benevolence?

Did you watch it? Clearly wants the food twice.

Reminds me of the sad fate of the software developer :)

Sort of related: I have two dogs. Dog #1 (the larger male dog) requests food from us and when food has been provided he sort of goes and gets Dog #2 (a smaller female). He then stands guard over her until she's done eating and then he eats his food. Could be a similar dynamic at work here?

Alternatively, they are so smart that they understand the benefits of social credit. The first crow could have been repaying past favor, or, making an investment.

"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 ;)

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

Could that indicate they have a pecking order (pun intended)?

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

You don't always need smart (bird) soldiers, just well-trained ones. Case in point: The dutch police is experimenting with eagles to bring down drones[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/eagles-v-drone...

I wonder what sort of defences people will start adding to their drones. Sharp blades or electric shocks will probably dissuade a bird from going near a drone again.

It is surprisingly easy to train a number of species of birds to attack any small object. Just have a room with a curtain and a bird on each side. Show one bird an actual threat, like a picture of a hawk, as the other is shown the object you want to train it on. Hearing the alarm and seeing only that object, the bird will learn that this thing is dangerous.

The trained bird can then easily train a whole flock.

I have long thought it would be funny to train birds to attack the little flags that you see on limousines that carry foreign dignitaries. Then release a flock of trained birds during some public event.

Arm the birds you say? https://www.reddit.com/r/birdswitharms/

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

Never used in combat, but supposedly very, very effective. Strap time-delayed incendiary bombs to hibernating bats, put them in a bomb case, release them over Japan. The bats go hide in buildings and start 1000s of fires.

But where are you going to get enough crows in one place to build an army?

Maybe Danville, IL

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-26/news/ct-met-cr...

Or Terre Haute, IN

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/terre-haute-battles-cro...

It doesn't end well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

I love they adhere to wikipedia war template.

Participants: Emus, Sir George Pearce, Major G.P.W. Meredith, Royal Australian Artillery

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

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.

  ...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.

Building nests - is it a use of tools?

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

OK, we've updated the submission title.

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