Aesop Was Right: Birds Use Rocks to Raise Water Level | Hacker News Reader

Aesop Was Right: Birds Use Rocks to Raise Water Level

blogs.discovermagazine.com

32 pointstimf13 comments

I don't want to suggest that this isn't very cool, but there was one thing about it that bugged me a little.

The researcher put the cylinder in the cage, and after the rook comes over to investigate, the researcher comes back and puts a handful of rocks right next to the cylinder. That seems like it would suggest to the rook that there's some connection between the cylinder and the rocks.

Again, it's still very impressive (especially considering the speed with which the bird puts two and two together), but it's not quite the same as the bird thinking, on its own, "Hey, you know what would help with this puzzle? Those rocks that appeared last week on the other side of my cage."

A crow, given food in a thin cylinder and a piece of wire, bends the wire into a hook and pulls the food out.

There's a whole lot of videos on the BBC site (and presumably on youtube as well) about all the interesting things that crows can do with the tools at hand (or beak).

The avian equivalent of Macguyver?

I thought this from the article was the most impressive:

In the experiment, described in Current Biology, the rooks proved highly accurate, placing in only the precise number of stones needed to raise the water level to a reachable height. Instead of trying to get the worm after each stone was dropped, they apparently estimated the number required from the outset and waited until the time was right [LiveScience]

But in the video, I see the rook checking after each rock if it can reach the worm yet.

Had the birds seen this happen before? I can obviously teach a dog to do that too, if they just associate put-rocks-in-worm-tube with get-food.

The source (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(09)0...) makes it sound like they had quite a few runs at it, but I only have the summary, and it's a bit hard to tell.

One of the things I thought after watching this is if Archimedes could have been inspired/influenced by noticing the crow's behavior or by Aesop's fable.

That's a pretty dim view of humanity-- do you really think that no one before Archimedes realized that stones displace water? Archimedes' "Eureka!" moment was a bit more profound than that.

A fantastically insightful video about the intelligence of crows from the TED Conference: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intel...

DISREGARD THAT HE EATS CROW

  1) The vending machine doesn't exist in the way it's presented
  2) He never actually performed substantive experiments
  3) The few trials he actually did were total failures
     * and mostly involved captive crows, indoors!
  4) What little real research exists is not his
     * The actual researchers divorced themselves from him
  5) He's a new media douchebag in ITP at NYU, not a biologist of any sort

The whole thing is Gladwellian just-so bullshit on so many levels, and the hype from the NYT and TED really pushed it over the top.

I'd appreciate if you pointed me to the article/statement of the researchers divorcing themselves from TED's video claims. Thanks.

i feel tricked

Slightly off-topic, but perhaps not too far: http://www.beaverandsteve.com/index.php?comic=228

repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747619

Reply on news.ycombinator.com