Abstract
The spontaneous crafting of hook-tools from bendable material to lift a basket out of a vertical tube in corvids has widely been used as one of the prime examples of animal tool innovation. However, it was recently suggested that the animals' solution was hardly innovative but strongly influenced by predispositions from habitual tool use and nest building. We tested Goffin's cockatoo, which is neither a specialized tool user nor a nest builder, on a similar task set-up. Three birds individually learned to bend hook tools from straight wire to retrieve food from vertical tubes and four subjects unbent wire to retrieve food from horizontal tubes. Pre-experience with ready-made hooks had some effect but was not necessary for success. Our results indicate that the ability to represent and manufacture tools according to a current need does not require genetically hardwired behavioural routines, but can indeed arise innovatively from domain general cognitive processing.
Highlights
In 2002, the New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides) ‘Betty’ spontaneously bent a straight piece of wire into a hook to lift a basket out of a vertical tube, after her mate had flown off with the appropriate tool [1]
Getting back to the first of the two main aims of this experiment, we can hereby confirm that tool-experienced but task-naive Goffin’s cockatoos can innovate the crafting of a functional hook from a novel pliant material. They do so despite the apparent lack of predispositions from behavioural routines involving the bending of stick-like structures during foraging or nest building, as it has recently been discussed for corvids [15,16]: three out of a total of 13 cockatoos independently bent straight pieces of wire into hooks and four birds unbent bent pieces of wire; in both conditions, two birds became consistently successful in using the crafted tool for retrieving food
The fact that the tasks were solved by a limited number of birds only and that none of those birds could find the solution in the very first test supports the assumption that Goffin’s cockatoos have to individually innovate the solution to the problem
Summary
In 2002, the New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides) ‘Betty’ spontaneously bent a straight piece of wire into a hook to lift a basket out of a vertical tube, after her mate had flown off with the appropriate tool [1]. Goffin’s cockatoos have shown the capacity to innovatively manufacture and use both compact and sticktype tools under laboratory conditions [19,20,21,22] These animals are opportunist island birds that feed on various, sometimes seasonal or new resources that often require different extractive foraging techniques (ongoing field research; B Mioduszewska, M O’Hara, DM Prawiradilaga, L Huber, AMI Auersperg, unpublished data). Their problem-solving and tool using abilities are unlikely to be influenced by behavioural predispositions but arise from a combination of general flexibility and powerful learning abilities [23]. If cockatoos innovate solutions to this novel problem, some individuals might discover toolmaking independently of their scaffolding history
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