The Animal Intelligence Thread

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

This is one of my pet peeves and I was thinking that we may have a thread to place news, articles or related information on animal intelligence. To start let's use a BBC article about crows able to solve a particularly difficult test:

The birds were presented with some out-of reach food; a long tool, which could be used to extract the food, but which was also out of reach, tucked behind the bars of a box; and a short tool, which could be used to extract the long tool, but which was attached to the end of a dangling piece of string tied to the crow's perch.

There is a video of the bird solving the problem on the article page.

[Griffin NoName]

It seems amazing the crow knows the short stick is too short.

[ivor]

Ravens are wicked smart.  They can open up backpacks and such.  It's not the size of the brain it's the amount of connections between neurons.  Dinosaurs may have been very scary smart.

[Darlica]

The whole Crow family are very intelligent, Crows and Ravens around here where known to go through and empty a trap like device used when fishing from the ice, they didn't got caught in the lines and they never went for the empty ones!
Magpies and Jackdaws are known to work like pick pocketers, one or more birds distract the individual that has whatever they covet the another one steals it. I've seen them use this tactic on birds of pray, cats, squirrels, and children.

Seagulls of various kinds are rather intelligent too but I don't think they are on the same level as Crows.


Dinosaurs, well , snakes and reptiles aren't known to be overly intelligent.
They have found a niche in nature that they fill very effectively using the senses they have: smell, sensitivity for heat and vibrations etc. They are supreme predators but they are not masters of adapting to new environment, like some birds and mammals.

As usual this rises the question what is intelligence?

[Sibling DavidH]

When I was a kid, a friend demonstrated convincingly that a crow will fly away if a drawn bow and arrow is aimed at it, but will ignore two crossed sticks.
The Welsh say that a crow can smell gunpowder, and certainly they and magpies are quite hard to shoot.  When shooting pigeons from a hide, if you can get a crow you put it out on the field as a decoy.  The theory is that a pigeon will feel safe where a crow does.  My father swore by it; for me the jury is out.
On the other hand, rooks on the nest are so easy that in my father's day a 'rook rifle' was a common gun.  In older times, 'Rookie Pie' was a well-known dish.
BTW do other countries have the custom of greeting a lone magpie?  Over here, many people consider it bad luck not to say hello to a single maggie and inquire after its health.  I don't believe in the bad luck bit, but I generally observe the custom because it's quaint.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Dinosaurs, well , snakes and reptiles aren't known to be overly intelligent. 

Dinos are birds, or better birds are a type of dinosaurs, interestingly from the same branch of the smartest dinosaurs (presumed by their brain to body ratio and circumvolutions inprints in the craneal cavity) like the deinonychosaurs and troodontids.

As usual this rises the question what is intelligence?

The typical benchmarks are adaptation, problem solving and language. We definitively have some bias in that area (what constitutes language, types of problem solving, what is a "valid" adaptation, etc), but you can create a subjective scale using those.

[Aggie]

BTW do other countries have the custom of greeting a lone magpie?  Over here, many people consider it bad luck not to say hello to a single maggie and inquire after its health.  I don't believe in the bad luck bit, but I generally observe the custom because it's quaint.

Never heard of it, although I often do greet them (and other corvids who show any regard).

[pieces o nine]

Seagulls of various kinds are rather intelligent too but I don't think they are on the same level as Crows.

Gulls may not be avian criminal masterminds, but they brazenly get what they want!
[youtube=425,350]e8OG5nWyQvo&feature=related[/youtube]


I had a corporate job in a building with large treated-glass windows. Every year for a week or two, large flocks of crows would perch all day outside along the brick sills, occasionally pecking at their reflections in the windows (we could see them, but they couldn't see in at us).

It freaked out the ornithophobes; for them it was always a bad time. For the rest of us, it was rather cool in a Hitchcockian way.

[Darlica]

Yes indeed.

And while not exactly using tools they are clever.
They fish up clams but can't open them so they find a bare rock fly over it and drop the clam...

One may think of them as a noisy collective but that is mostly social time, nights and mornings, when they sit on the rocks together as a strategy against predators.

If a gull find a good feeding spot, he/she will guard it, and warn others from getting too close. One summer when we where sailing in the east coast archipelago of Sweden we had large gull following us for three days! When we where sailing he hanged like a paper kite in the out wind of out main sail, when we had anchored he sat on our skiff.
And yes, he got loads of treats of our table, much to our dog's dismay.

[Griffin NoName]

BTW do other countries have the custom of greeting a lone magpie?  Over here, many people consider it bad luck not to say hello to a single maggie and inquire after its health.  I don't believe in the bad luck bit, but I generally observe the custom because it's quaint.

It amuses me how we all know these things like we've been taught them in school. What a lot of rubbish we have in our brains. Today I touched wood for someone when they couldn't find any to touch.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Reviving this thread from the depths to mention a little anecdote. Occasionally we go to a nearby park with my wife to give bread to the ubiquitous ducks, which BTW are many, and now among them a dozen or more ibis take advantage of the passersby generosity.

This particular time, the bread we had was quite hardened making it difficult to give, or the pieces too big for any of the birds to eat, then we noticed something interesting, one or two ibis took the hardened bread to the pond to make it wet and easier to eat. The behavior seemed deliberate which surprised us both.

I know that parrots and crows are extremely intelligent, and that a number of passeriformes are actually not that far on intelligence from corvids (which is a sub family of passerines), but I never expected an ibis (a pelicaniform) to be smart.

Makes me wonder how many species I'm underestimating.

[Griffin NoName]

Makes me wonder, with our much bigger brains, why we are so unintelligent !

[Sibling DavidH]

Quite.  A crow is brighter than most politicians, after all.  We should teach them to talk and put them in charge.

[Swatopluk]

Quite.  A crow is brighter than most politicians, after all.  We should teach them to talk and put them in charge.

Enough carrion birds in policy already (my apology to any literal corvid)
Not to forget all the pleitegeiers

[anthrobabe]

Smartest beings on the planet--
Orangutans
so patient and they just watch and ponder and learn and then
Ka-Blam someone is out and on the loose.


Of course what is intelligence anyway, like someone said/asked?

This is usually the point in class where we begin to learn that smart and intelligent are not the same and that we are not learning bottom up evolution(because that isn't really correct) and then the little twinkles in the eyes of some of the sharper students begin to fire.

I think so may birds pick up on the wee details and this is what makes them appear to be so clever-- they are into the details and often by seeing details (short vs long stick) is what makes a being just wayyyyyyy like smart ya know man.

[Roland Deschain]

Great thread. I've seen the apparent intelligence (or problem-solving skills) of crows, rooks, ravens, magpies, and jackdaws too. They can all be tamed quite easily, although they retain a wild element.

Another group of animals with intelligence are the great apes. I watched a programme on the BBC iPlayer a little while ago, and it featured a woman who was studying chimpanzees in the wild. The type she was studying lived mainly in the savannah of Africa. Although apes exhibit tool use to get food, this specific type of chimpanzee uses tools far more frequently, and will stand up on their hind legs to see over the long grasses. It's quite haunting seeing that, as to me it feels like an echo of what happened so long ago in our own past. This is history repeating itself.