It begins!
Smart Crow Makes Her Own Tools
Thu Aug 8, 2:12 PM ET
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Betty was hungry, but the food was out of reach and the tool needed to get at it had been swiped by a bully. What to do? Grab some wire, bend it into a hook, and get the food. Betty may be a crow, but she's no birdbrain. And she repeated the success over and over, using bent wires to pull the small bucket of food up by its handle. Her exploits are reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
"We were delighted and extremely surprised," said Alex Kacelnik, who teaches at England's Oxford University, where Betty performed her feat. Kacelnik is also a fellow at the Science College of Berlin.
Kacelnik and his colleagues were trying to determine if the crows, who have been known to use twigs to pick things up in the wild, could choose the right tool to retrieve food.
They did not, however, expect the birds to make their own tools.
Indeed, it was a surprising development, agreed Richard Banks, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Banks, an expert on North American crows, said he has seen a report of some species using items as tools, but not actually making them.
Some African chimpanzees have been observed selecting and using stones to open nuts and monkeys are known to use sticks to fish edible ants and termites out of their nests.
"Toolmaking and tool use has always been considered one of the diagnostics of a superior intelligence," Kacelnik said. "Now a bird is shown to have greater sophistication than many closer relatives of us humans."
"People expect apes to be the pinnacle of intelligence in the animal kingdom because they are our closest relatives, but nature may have reached different solutions to similar problems," he said. "There is no doubt that the tool-manufacturing abilities of these animals have evolved independently of that of primates, and this gives us a lever to understand what makes intelligent solutions an advantage."
The Oxford researchers were working with a species of crow known as Corvus moneduloides, a type that lives on the island of New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.
Two crows - Betty and Abel - were presented with a small bucket of food placed down inside a tube and given two pieces of wire, one hooked and one straight.
"Our surprise came when, in the fifth trial, the male stole the hooked wire from the female and took it away. Far from giving up, she then picked the remaining straight wire and bent it herself," Kacelnik explained.
"To make sure of our observation, we then offered repeatedly only the straight wire, and she unfailingly did the same trick over and over again," he went on.
Both birds had used hooks before, he noted. "In fact these crows do use hooks made out of twigs in the wild."
But wire was new to them, he said, and making a hook of the right dimensions out of a new and unfamiliar material is strong evidence that at least one animal understands how tools function.
Abel was able to get food once using the straight wire, but never did any bending on his own. However, once Betty managed to get the food using her bent wires, Abel stole some of it from her.
Does this mean girl crows are smarter than boys?
"Unfortunately, we cannot say this," Kacelnik responded.
Abel is older and stronger than Betty, he explained, so while she often shows an interest in solving tasks, he will wait until she gets the food and then steal it from her by brute force.
"This may in fact be an intelligent - if unpleasant - strategy, and it does not mean that he would not be able to achieve other solutions, given a different motivation," Kacelnik said.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=816&ncid=816&e=1&u=/ap/20020808/ap_on_fe_st/toolmaking_crow_2
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Made by Aggie.
This message was edited by AJinDC on 8-9-02 @ 2:34 PM