Some birds use discarded cigarettes to fumigate their nests | Hacker News Reader

Some birds use discarded cigarettes to fumigate their nests

economist.com

135 pointssethbannon41 comments

Then came the crows:

Amazing ... now we will have crow butlers picking up cigarette butts.

Not a problem in NYC by the way ;-)

Do we know much about the reliability of crow behavioral science (or whatever the field is called, if it has a name)?

Josh Klein, the fellow who popularized the ideas of crows being trained by a machine to retrieve things for reward, turned out to be extremely misleading[1] about the circumstances and reliability of his research.

Granted, Joshua Klein is not connected to the startup in the popular mechanics link, but interestingly, that startup does cite Klein as their source of inspiration[2] on their website.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14Ideas-section4B... (see editors note)

2. http://www.crowdedcities.com

How does it tell the difference between a crow it has seen before and a new crow? Would it just dispense free peanuts to all crows?

It dispenses in response to cigarettes, not crows (at least after training), so it wouldn't really matter I don't think.

> (at least after training)

That is the question.

The article described "training" as progressing from free peanuts to peanuts for butts.

Maybe after the initial training period they just rely on crows learning from each other

I believe this is because nicotine is an insecticide?

For some reason I'm imagining the birds carrying lit cigarettes and smoking out their nests LOL.

Would be interesting to check nests near tobacco plants and see if the birds utilize the plants.

>I believe this is because nicotine is an insecticide?

Okay, but how would a bird know that?

Survival of the fittest? The birds that do it could fare better that those that don't, leading to a healthier offspring, etc...

Yep, same way AlphaGo Zero learned to play. It evolved, generation by generation, by selection. People think an agent can't solve a problem unless it has full understanding, but that's not true, selection based on fitness can do it.

i'm wondering if 15-25 generations (that's approximately how many generations of garden birds were there since the invention of the cigarettes with filters) are enough for evolution to actually show this trend here

Tangentially related - there was the russian experiment on fox domestication that had decent success in selecting for "tameability" with just 3 generations.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160912-a-soviet-scientist-c...

I think some birds are actually pretty smart and can learn by imitating other birds, so it's a cultural thing. All it takes is one bird to discover it.

Take a look at this video: "Crow uses a vending machine". It was an experiment where they trained crows to collect coins and put them into a vending machine for a few grains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qSsVBPh9Lo

Cue fun time with etymology: understand translated to Latin and back yields support, which is significant, kinda, because support vectors are one model of machine intelligence, while DNA is basically a vector, in terms of transcription, or a matrix even, looking closer at the base molecules.

disclaimer: I have n o idea about support vectors, to be honest

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are a classification technique that was in vogue before 2012, with great results for smallish problems. It's still useful today, but less talked about, I mean, it's just assumed as common knowledge.

Not an expert, but I do not think that you need an evolutionary explanation: birds are often not stupid, and can simply observe that nests with more cigarettes have less parasites.

We know they're capable of passing complex information onto each other. What "a bad man's face" looks like for instance, I'm sure some of HN has seen the documentaries on their abilities.

I wonder if they choose nesting material based on insulation properties also. Cigarette stubs are probably great for stuffing into cracks and it is known that plugging air gaps dramatically increases whole house/nest insulation value.

Do birds spend time observing the nest of their peers? AFAIK the only nests they care about are their own (though I'm definitely not an ornithologist, I'm mostly ignorant about them in general).

But that's the beauty of Darwinism, whether the information is stored in the genes or in their culture (memetically) doesn't matter, the selection/amplification process is the same.

Sure. Birds die, other birds take over nest.

not that fast

Ticks are not a new problem for birds, they probably started to incorporate insecticide plants into their nests long before cigarettes were invented.

Maybe they identified through smell that cigarettes contain tobacco, a known insecticide plant.

It would have been more interesting to add placebo butts and also a nicotine carrying material that looks differently than the butts.

We have a bird feeder in our garden, which has a river at the bottom and is surrounded by forest, so we get a lot of birds.

I've often noticed blue tits (UK) in particular stealing cigarette ends out of the ashtray that sits on our windowsill. I've read about the "nicotine as an insecticide" theory before, but my understanding is that most birds don't nest all year round, and they seem to take the cigarette ends through autumn and winter.

Maybe they simply get hooked on the nicotine? Used cigarette ends are pretty much oozing with all the nasty stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if some of that ends up in their system, and they develop a liking for it.

That's supposedly the case for NYC pigeons [0], funny in a weird way but actually quite depressing. I wonder how many rats and other rodents are also hooked on cigarette butts?

[0] http://johnjpowers.blogspot.de/2013/09/pigeons-addicted-to-n...

That website is obviously a joke:

>”We immediately noticed a large majority of the pigeons display external signs of chemical addiction. They are often found standing in a group outside of a building. They twitch often and look around with sharp turns of the head. They have anti-social tendencies and are quick to fly when confronted. Their breath smells terrible and they leave droppings everywhere they go. After thorough research we have proven that 98% of pigeons in New York City are hooked on nicotine. Each of the birds in the study reek of smoke and are constantly fidgeting and adjusting their wings. We have also observed the hoarse, raspy mating calls of these nicotine-addicted birds."

>The Mayor has started a new program to help these city birds break their addiction. If you notice a pigeon displaying signs of nicotine addiction call 311 to report it and get it the help it needs.

That article is a joke, and there's no real study (it's not even named). The final sentence is obviously not serious: "If you notice a pigeon displaying signs of nicotine addiction call 311 to report it and get it the help it needs."

I figured there was something off about it due to lack of a source, also couldn't find any studies like that when searching, that's why I put the "supposedly" in there.

Still kinda odd that nobody seems to have actually looked into a connection like that.

I'd love to know how these birds acquire the knowledge that fumigating with cigarettes Works and if/how they pass that knowledge along.

Sometimes I think life is just one big joke and that I'm going to wake up in a lab with technicians around me laughing "He really believed yellow labradors evolved from wolves! How gullible!"

If you don't like the economist paywall here's another aricle: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2138655-birds-use-cigar...

> To firm up the conclusion, Macías Garcia and his team experimented with 32 house finch nests. One day after the eggs in the nest had hatched, the researchers removed the natural nest lining and replaced it with artificial felt, to remove any parasites that might have moved in during brooding. They then added live ticks to 10 of the nests, dead ticks to another 10 and left 12 free of ticks.

> They found that the adult finches were significantly more likely to add cigarette butt fibres to the nest if it contained ticks. What’s more, the weight of cigarette butt material added to nests containing live ticks was, on average, 40 per cent greater than the weight of cigarette butt material added to nests containing dead ticks.

Another possibility: being fed on by blood-sucking parasites makes birds crave the taste/smell of cigarettes, without any understanding of the insecticidal properties.

Evolution does not require understanding on the part of the creature that is evolving.

Indeed, I doubt any gecko understands the Van der Vaals forces that enable them to stick to walls, but they use it all the same.

Doesn't say whether the butts are still smoking when collected, which could have a historic association with fire and bugs.

I _knew_ I was contributing something by smoking.

Smoker here. s/littering/smoking.

I feel bad for them now people are switching to e-cigarettes

It won't let me read the article as I've supposedly "reached my article limit". From what I can read, before the paywall pops up, this seems based on similar (the same?) research as an old Atlantic article [0] from 2012?

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/birds-app...

Opening economist links in pivate/incognito mode removes the limit barrier on paywalled sites that use cookies

Thanks for the tip! I pondered trying that option but I didn't think they'd actually make it as easy as that, what a pointless hassle.

So it's a follow-up experiment on that 2012 study, that's interesting.

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