Strong between-site variation in New Caledonian crows' use of hook-tool-making materials
Abstract
Functional tool use requires the selection of appropriate raw materials. New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides are known for their extraordinary tool-making behaviour, including the crafting of hooked stick tools from branched vegetation. We describe a surprisingly strong between-site difference in the plant materials used by wild crows to manufacture these tools: crows at one study site use branches of the non-native shrub Desmanthus virgatus, whereas only approximately 7 km away, birds apparently ignore this material in favour of the terminal twigs of an as-yet-unidentified tree species. Although it is likely that differences in local plant communities drive this striking pattern, it remains to be determined how and why crows develop such strong site-specific preferences for certain raw materials.
Citation
St Clair , J , Klump , B C , van der Wal , J E M , Sugasawa , S & Rutz , C 2016 , ' Strong between-site variation in New Caledonian crows' use of hook-tool-making materials ' , Biological Journal of the Linnean Society , vol. 118 , no. 2 , pp. 226-232 . https://doi.org/10.1111/bij.12757
Publication
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0024-4066Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2016, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
The study was funded through a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship (grants BB/G023913/1 and BB/G023913/2 to CR) and doctoral studentships from the BBSRC (BK), JASSO (SS), and the School of Biology, University of St Andrews (JvdW).Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.