First evidence found of tool use by seabirds | Hacker News Reader

First evidence found of tool use by seabirds

phys.org

127 pointsdnetesn25 comments

This is hilarious. If you watch the video you could see that the bird picked up that stick and then needed to scratch its belly, but it didn't want to throw the nice stick either. This looks ... natural :)

Indeed. Could also just be grooming as I’m not sure the bird would feel that under his thick feathers.

Pretty sure a researcher would conclude my cat uses me as a very sophisticated tool. I’m pretty responsive to his demands and the guy steers me around with his body all day (standing in my way, ankle rubs, knocking things down, etc)

I expected this to be about sea gulls. I think they're smarter than most people give them credit for; I've seen them open zippered bags on the beach, and they have a sort of fearless approach to humans that reminds me of the way crows behave around humans.

Apparently tool use has been observed in some gulls so maybe the the article title is overstating the matter a little (unless gulls aren't considered seabirds?): https://bioone.org/journals/waterbirds/volume-29/issue-2/152...

The title is definitely overstating and the linked journal article is more informative. IMO, the article title should have been:

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First evidence found of body-care-related tool use by seabirds

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Why aren't nests considered tools?

From a quick Googling it looks like birds' nest-building techniques can differ by individual and can be learned/shared among social peers. So, yeah, it seems like they maybe should be classified as tools.

Contrast this with "fixed action patterns" like the way cats try to bury their shit and piss even to the point of pawing at the smooth floor next to their litterboxes. Superficially it seems like a fairly sophisticated behavior, but it's really a hardwired compulsion.

Nest-building might be somewhere in the middle. I don't know if a bird raised with zero socialization is typically capable of building a nest.

Ants are interesting in that their use of agriculture predates humans. Somewhat humbling to think that ants with their insignificant insect brains had that figured out for millions of years before our ancestors did.

Who’s to say humans didn’t copy the ants? I’ve always been fascinated by what I call “uninventable inventions”. These are things we use commonly but never had the chance to invent ourselves due to their common occurrence in nature. Examples are: the fluid carrying tube (since arteries would easily be observed in killed animals), the sphere (think eye balls), or wings to fly with (i.e. the general shape of a modern jetliner).

Interestingly the wings on a jetliner (and man-made planes in general) don’t really look anything like wings on birds or insects nor do they function in the same way.

In fact, one of the big breakthroughs in flight was to stop trying to make them like birds. Planes fly like birds in the same way that submarines swim like fish, i.e. they don’t.

Many aspects are. A rounded leading edge cross-section and a sharp trailing edge cross-section. Upward slopping Dihedral and rear slopping wing. Tail feathers and aircraft’s tails.

Winglets are similar to features on many bird species, though this is most obvious during down flapping.

You might be right to 2nd order, but the fact is it's no accident that these two objects look so similar:

https://imgur.com/a/dKLQQ2j

Even better is the similarity between a bird seen side-on in level gliding flight and the same view of a B2. I tried to get an image link to put here but the internet has become impossible to use, so just Google it I guess.

It seems that the biggest difference between bird wings and airplane wings is that the former use a bell-shaped (per Prandtl) span loading that induces proverse yaw on on roll and allows them to turn without separate yaw input. The elliptical span loading used by the vast majority of man-made aircraft causes adverse yaw, which is probably the biggest reason most aircraft need rudders. Even the B2 has split-aileron drag rudders at its wingtips for this reason.

Wow thanks for that! For anyone being lazy, please take a look:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/dxwi51/b2_ste...

I'm reading "bachteria to Bach" by Dennett and he talks about this I believe. Birds that are born/raised without their mother can build a species-like nest their first year, and will build a better nest the following year, but will build a better nest the first year if they aren't taken from their mother. So the book talks about learning vs hard wired. The idea in the book is that nest building is both, but seemed quite a bit hard wired

Maybe they should, but considering nests as such probably make it harder to find animals that don't use tools than those that do. Even many species of fish create nests. Also, I wonder where you'd draw the line. Are borrows a kind of nest? That seems fair, but then are earth worms creating nests when they burrow? Are they using the earth itself as a tool, to conceal themselves from hungry birds? Probably not, that seems like a stretch.. but ants surely create nests. There is also the matter of animals that don't dig their own burrows but do use those dug by other animals. Snakes do this a lot I think, should that be considered tool use? Are the parasitic mites that inhabit unhealthy bee nests using tools? Then there is the matter of animals that create structures using material their own body creates. Are web weaving spiders tool users? What about snails? Or crabs that live in deceased snail shells?

> Even many species of fish create nests.

There are certainly examples of fish using tools in more 'sophisticated' ways than mere nest-building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnOYpuKV4H4

There's a line there somewhere. But, I'm not sure which side bird nest building falls. Many birds aren't just making a dirt hole, they're taking whatever material is at hand and "crafting" a well-shaped structure. String, twigs, leaves, hair, etc.

It does seem a bit odd to me that gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans build nests in trees, yet the most often cited example of their tool use is fishing for termites with twigs. As far as fashioning things from sticks goes, fishing for termites hardly seems like the pinnacle of their technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest-building_in_primates#In_h...

See my comments above, but it seems like the line is whether the offspring will do that behavior even if isolated at birth. If they do, it's hard wired, if not, then it's learned.

I think is clear the title is implying adaptive tool use, the bird had a specific need and found a specific tool for it, in the other hand nests are behaviors deeply integrated in the genes of a species seen in almost every member of it even when it doesn't make any sense, that's why 'pet' beavers try to irrationally build dams in places without water.

I'd consider a nest a structure rather than a tool.

A mechanical tool usually implies some sort of motion to produce a desired effect.

Good question which they should question themselves.

It is difficult to get a scientist to understand something when his claim of novelty depends on his not understanding it.

Crows use cars to crack nuts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0

Gulls drop oysters from up high to break them open (using the rock as a tool). Aren't they seabirds too?

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