CROWS USE TOOLS, EAT HEALTH FOOD

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the robots, now we gotta worry about rapidly smartifying crows. We’ve known for a while that crows are capable of using tools, but a new article in the journal Science (catchy name) says that New Caledonian crows got mad skillz, using sticks to fish for beetle larvae:

This is a very specialized task, because the crows fish for just one beetle species (the wood boring longhorn beetle) in the trunk of a single species of tree (the candlenut tree).

Why that beetle in particular? If a crow eats just three of those larvae, that’s enough food for the day.

Old Caledonian crows, meanwhile, just sit around and complain how it’s not like back in their day before everyone started using these fancy sticks, by cracky.

Next up in the animal world: rapidly evolving anti-stick technology for wood boring longhorn beetle larvae.

I’ll stop now.

After this: