Posted on 11/12/2018 2:57:12 PM PST by ETL
Orangutans are among the most intelligent primates. They have human-like long-term memory, routinely use a variety of sophisticated tools in the wild and construct elaborate sleeping nests each night from foliage and branches. ..."
“The hook-bending task has become a benchmark paradigm to test tool innovation abilities in comparative psychology,” said co-author Dr. Alice Auersperg, a scientist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.
“Considering the speed of their hook innovation, it seems that orangutans actively invented a solution to this problem rather than applying routined behaviors.”
“In the study, we confronted Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) with a vertical tube containing a reward basket with a handle and a straight piece of wire and, in a second task, with a horizontal tube containing a reward at its center and a piece of wire that was bent at 90 degrees,” Dr. Laumer explained.
“Retrieving the reward from the vertical tube thus required the orangutans to bent a hook into the wire to fish the basket out of the tube. The horizontal tube in turn required the apes to unbent the bent piece of wire in order to make it long enough to push the food out of the tube.”
Several orangutans mastered the hook bending task and the unbending task. Two orangutans even solved both tasks within the first minutes of the very first trial.
“The orangutans mostly bent the hooks directly with their teeth and mouth while keeping the rest of the tool straight,” Dr. Laumer said.
“Thereafter they immediately inserted it in correct orientation, hooked the handle and pulled the basket up.”
“Finding this capacity in one of our closest relatives is astonishing,” said co-author Dr. Josep Call, a researcher at the University of St Andrews, UK.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
I agree, although I've known some retarded pets.
Well yeah, especially chocolate labs!
I work out to the tape, "Five Minute Labs", weird to see dogs in spandex.
I work out to the tape, “Five Minute Pecks”, weirder to see birds in spandex.
I was going to try that one, but my credit card *bill* was already too high.
Bkmk
And therer’s birds that use sticks in ant hills to get them to the dinner plate....and a fish that slams shellfish against rocks to break them open...ad otters use rocks and other shellfish to bust open their meals...
Broward county voter?
31 was of course a joke.
If so, not a typical one. Most don’t know how to operate a computer touchscreen.
Inventive Orangutans Make Hook Tools to Retrieve Food
I posted a thread on crows in October...
Posted on 10/29/2018, 11:34:52 AM by ETL
Assemblage of different components into novel functional and maneuverable tools has, until now, only been observed in apes, and anthropologists regard early human compound tool manufacture as a significant step in brain evolution.
Children take several years before creating novel tools, probably because it requires anticipating properties of yet unseen objects.
-snip-
In the study, Dr. Kacelnik and colleagues presented eight wild-caught New Caledonian crows with a puzzle box they had never encountered before, containing a small food container behind a door that left a narrow gap along the bottom.
Initially, the scientists left some sufficiently long sticks scattered around, and all the birds rapidly picked one of them, inserted it through the front gap, and pushed the food to an opening on the side of the box. All eight birds did this without any difficulty.
In the next steps, the team left the food deep inside the box but provided only short pieces, too short to reach the food.
These short pieces could potentially be combined with each other, as some were hollow and others could fit inside them.
In one example, they gave the birds barrels and plungers of disassembled hypodermic syringes. Without any help or demonstration, four of the crows partially inserted one piece into another and used the resulting longer compound pole to reach and extract the food.
At the end of the five-step investigation, the researchers made the task more difficult by supplying even shorter combinable parts, and found that one bird particular bird, ‘Mango,’ was able to make compound tools out of three and even four parts.
“The finding is remarkable because the crows received no assistance or training in making these combinations, they figured it out by themselves,” said study co-lead author Dr. Auguste von Bayern, from the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology and University of Oxford.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.