Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028

by robg • 18 years ago

31 7 18 years ago

npr.org

nirmal• 18 years ago

The TED Talk mentioned: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intel...

Or a link to the MP4 version: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/download/video/4555/talk/...

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

Crows are technically the most intelligent birds, but people expect parrots to be due to their speech capabilities.

zack• 18 years ago

From Wikipedia:

Intelligence

As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, and Aesop's fable of The Crow and the Pitcher shows that humans have long viewed the crow as an intelligent animal. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale. Crows in the northwestern U.S. show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens. Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing. Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order.

One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied recently because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day search for food, including dropping seeds into a heavy trafficked street and waiting for a car to crush them open. On October 5, 2007, researchers from the University of Oxford, England presented data acquired by mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. It turned out that they use a larger variety of tools than previously known, plucking, smoothing and bending twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs. Crows in Queensland Australia have learned how to eat the toxic cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.

zeynel• 18 years ago

Very interesting. Thanks for the TED link. But is there a reason why he is not showing an actual crow dropping a coin in the box? All he shows is a drawing and then he describes what happens.

seiji• 18 years ago

Students who captured crows for tagging the first time were continually harrassed by the birds afterwards.

Now when students capture birds for tagging they wear masks and hats.

12ren2• 18 years ago

Crows "finding" money is problematic, as it might not be "lost"... intelligence (evolution, flow of water, etc) has a way of finding the shortest path. It seems tricky to specify the goal clearly, so the crows are trained to find only "lost" money. Perhaps only reward them for coins that were on the ground? As opposed to in someone's pocket, purse, on a shop counter, in a cash register, in a bank... hmm, this experiment could end badly.

Crows more intelligent than monkeys, he claims in the following (1 min) video. Could that be true? http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/03/taking_over_the_...

We try to kill off adaptive pests like roaches, rats and crows, but we're breeding them to be parasites ... a better goal ... is to seek an interspecies harmony.

Lovely idea! Reminds me of how parasites became symbiotes, then integrated, as has been argued for some cellular machinery (eg mitochondria and chloroplasts) by Lynn Margulis: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3IIWSOA7G9YKL . It also reminds me of "The Evolution of Cooperation" Axelrod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

12ren2• 18 years ago

linked TED talk: "Can we domesticate germs?" http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_do...

I think there's no reason for infections to be harmful. Why not an infection that benefits the host? Some do, for examples the bacteria in your gut, that help you digest food.

How could we hack the environment to favour beneficial infections?

Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money

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