New Scientist
Image: foxypar4
Whoever heard of birds cooperating on a project together? Sure, a pair may build a nest together, but cooperating on a single task to get food is something only primates have been thought capable of. Now it turns out that rooks, like chimps, can cooperate with each other – although they may lack the competitive edge needed understand teamwork properly.
Amanda Seed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues tested cooperation between pairs of rooks.
They placed a 60 centimetre-long tray laden with food just out of the reach of two rooks placed inside a box. The rooks could see the food through a slit but had to use string thread through eyeholes at the back of the tray to drag it through the slit towards them.
To get their meal, however, the rooks were also forced to team up. Pulling just one end of the string simply unthreaded it without moving the tray. Only when the birds each pulled one end of the string simultaneously did the tray move.
Seed’s team found that, with very limited training, all eight birds they studied mastered this act of cooperation – a specialisation previously thought unique to primates.Read more on newscientist.com…
