Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Rooks can figure out how to use tools to get the food floating at the bottom of a long tube, just like their relative does in Aesop’s ancient fable The Crow and the Pitcher, according to a new study published in Current Biology. Zoologists report that rooks, which do not usually use tools in the wild, were able to size up the problem and solve it by using stones as tools.

The experiments echo Aesop’s fable, published more than 2,000 years ago, where a crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level so it can quench its thirst. The experiment here involved a bird figuring out how to get to its favourite food item – the larvae of a wax moth, because the researchers couldn’t deprive the birds of water for ethical reasons.

Nathan Emery, co-author of the paper, from Queen Mary University of London, said: “The rooks have to put multiple stones in the tube until the worm floats to the top.” And when they were presented with rocks of different sizes, they went for the larger ones that get the worm out quicker. “They are being as efficient as possible,” Emery told the BBC.

Emery’s co-author is the appropriately named Christopher Bird, who has previously featured on the Great Beyond for his 2008 paper ‘Using video playback to investigate the social preferences of rooks’.

This study adds to the growing evidence that corvids, like great apes, have evolved a problem-solving intelligence requiring a general understanding of physical rules.

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