Hook innovation boosts foraging efficiency in tool-using crows

The New Caledonian crow is the only non-human animal known to craft hooked tools in the wild, but the ecological benefit of these relatively complex tools remains unknown. Here, we show that crows acquire food several times faster when using hooked rather than non-hooked tools, regardless of tool material, prey type and extraction context. This implies that small changes to tool shape can strongly affect energy-intake rates, highlighting a powerful driver for technological advancement.

Citation

St Clair , J J H , Klump , B C , Sugasawa , S , Higgott , C G , Colegrave , N & Rutz , C 2018 , ' Hook innovation boosts foraging efficiency in tool-using crows ' , Nature Ecology and Evolution , vol. 2 , no. 3 , pp. 441-444 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0429-7

Publication

Nature Ecology and Evolution

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0429-7

ISSN

2397-334X

Type

Journal article

Rights

Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0429-7

Description

The study was funded through a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship (grant BB/G023913/2 to C.R.), and PhD studentships from the BBSRC (B.K.) and JASSO (S.S.).

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15625