Wild birds learn to avoid distasteful prey by watching others | Hacker News Reader

Wild birds learn to avoid distasteful prey by watching others

helsinki.fi

61 pointshhs33 comments

Birds watch everything. That's a huge part of the advantage of flight; you can roost high up and get an overview of any situation. Crows are extremely intelligent and have developed a heightened ability to do "systems thinking"--working out the elements of any situation, how they interact, what causality there is, etc.

It's great that they keep finding these new behaviors, but this shouldn't be surprising when you work out the implications of having a good brain, a high perch, and a lot of time and curiosity (a crow's lifespan could be 30 years or more). Add social learning aspects and an as-yet-undeciphered language of calls, and there's a lot of intelligence there.

> this shouldn't be surprising when you work out the implications of having a good brain, a high perch, and a lot of time and curiosity

Under what circumstances do those things have poorer implications?

"Curiosity killed the cat"

Isn't curiosity a synonym for adventurous stupidity in this idiom?

> "Curiosity killed the cat" is an idiom-proverb used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation. It also implies that being curious can sometimes lead to danger or misfortune.

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

"Curiosity was framed, ignorance killed the cat."

There's something to be said for a healthy respect for what you don't understand yet, particularly dangerous situations.

The thing about unknown unknowns is that they're unknown. By definition we can't reason about them.

Even more amazing to me is that crows can communicate what someone looks like to another crow. Then that other crow will be able to identify that person without ever having seen them before.

Whoa. Do you have any links I can read about this? That sounds incredible

Check out this video starting at the 4:06 mark.

https://youtu.be/LF77qpbvkxo?t=4m6s

They talk about crows passing knowledge from one generation to the next, and they show an experiment that they performed on some crows.

While the young crows are still in their eggs, the scientists wear masks and capture the adult crows, teaching the adult crows that this mask means danger. What they then find out is whether the adult crows pass the knowledge of the dangerous mask on to their young.

However, in this video the young are learning about the dangerous mask because they get to see the adults react directly to it.

I don’t know anything similar where the adults communicate this kind of thing without the masked person being present.

It is possible that the young ones in turn taught the next generation without the masked individual being present. But I don’t remember and am not going to watch the whole video again right now.

Do they actually communicate semantic information enabling another crow to identify a person? Or do they just communicate "that's him, that's the guy that threw a rock at Bobby Crow!"?

I find it fascinating how many deeply embedded tactical considerations that we just take for granted come from the fact that our ecosystem lives in a gravity well. I wonder how differently an alien that had evolved for millennia in zero G would think?

It's pretty likely that most life arises in gravity wells, simply because life requires a concentration of matter somewhat higher than that in empty space (otherwise what is it made out of?), and a concentration of matter is equal to a gravity well.

Life as we know it.

Surely you're not implying there might ever be such a thing as life not made out of matter, are you?

There was a fun little episode of PBS SpaceTime that wondered what if there is life inside a sun?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNK5oahmw3I

Practically speaking, aquatic life moves around pretty freely in three dimensions. It's not perfectly equivalent to zero G, but it's at least illustrative.

People often forget how insanely varied life on earth is. Often we see anthropomorphic aliens depicted in media while it’d be so easy to look into the ocean to find any possible shape or life that doesn’t resemble humans in the least.

>you can roost high up and get an overview of any situation. Crows are extremely intelligent and have developed a heightened ability to do "systems thinking"--working out the elements of any situation, how they interact, what causality there is, etc.

Humans have a similar advantage in obtaining overviews (besides raw brain power). Because of bipedalism, humans are probably the tallest land predators among mammals. Polar bears come closest with a max shoulder height of about 1.6m.

this is the real reason you shouldnt mess with / look at bird nests. Its not that the parents will 'smell a human' and not come back, that's not true at all. When you mess with or even look at a nest, you draw attention to predators. They see you looking and learn of the nest location.

Now I wonder if some birds will fool other birds by pretending something isn't good.

> Now I wonder if some birds will fool other birds by pretending something isn't good.

How would they do that? If other birds are watching to see if they eat the food, it seems that your options (as a deceptive bird) are not to eat it (in which case they might be fooled, but you lose the food) or to eat it (in which case they aren't fooled—they aren't looking for your subsequent review of the prey!).

By watching for when you're being watched. Don't eat it when you're being watched. Then eat it when you're not being watched.

Eat it and then feign sickness. As long as you check for predators first you have a good chance of scaring competitors away from the rest of the food.

Your comment reminded me of this video of ravens trying to hide food from each other. They clearly demonstrate a robust theory of mind. Each is keenly aware of the other's goals and capabilities.

Seeing this, I could imagine birds using the strategy you describe.

[0] https://youtu.be/Sng1oV_uDzM

My wife got an African Grey parrot during lockdown - it repeats some phrases but I sometimes it uses a phrase under the "right" circumstances.

Like "what are you doing" - usually when I sit down at my PC or in bed reading a book.

Maybe I am just imagining things.

Considering the African Grey is definitively one of the smartest birds in the world, it's intelligence and emotional capacity being that of a 5 year old human, you are probably not imagining anything :P.

That's the species that had a famous bird right? Alex I think.

I have a cat that unfortunately has caught a couple birds. They get unusually close to it while tweeting loudly. It is almost like they are trying to taunt it away.

Birds definitely do this to cats. My parents used to have a cat which could occasionally located by listening to where magpies were shouting. Now that the cat is gone, the magpies can often be located by listening to where the thrushes are shouting.

It's common for humans to misunderestimate the cognitive abilities of other species. So common, in fact, it could be described as a characteristic of that species.

Do goldfish really have a 3-second memory?

https://www.livescience.com/goldfish-memory.html

Anyone who has watched birds find a dish of cat or dog food on the back porch knows they watch each other. The same thing goes for a place to roost (as in under the eves.) One bird might find the food or the place to roost by accident but other birds are watching.

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