Rooks reveal remarkable tool use | Hacker News Reader

Rooks reveal remarkable tool use

news.bbc.co.uk

10 pointstdonia10 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intel...

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

Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8787802...

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

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

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)?

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.

That's true. I'd forgotten about insects. There's been some interesting work done on their visual system (google 'optic flow' insect).

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