Meet a spectrum of species whose mental agility and problem-solving skills will put some humans to shame.
Stuart Blackman Quinton Winter
inefficient detours, leaving a direct trail to the food. It’s an unconventional way of solving complex problems, but it’s effective.
It’s hard enough being in touch with one’s own emotions let alone anyone else’s. But such mind-reading skills are not unique to humans. In a series of rather uncomfortable experiments, scientists trained rats to pull a lever to access a tasty treat. Once the animals had got the hang of that, the lever was re-wired to simultaneously deliver an electric shock to another rat. At which point, the empathetic rodents stopped pressing the lever, sparing their friends (or even complete strangers) an unpleasant experience, even though it meant missing out on the reward.
Any animal that can swear like a trooper and dance in time to Motörhead has clearly got something going on between the ears. But there’s one species of parrot that’s more mathematically minded. Train a kea to associate black (but not orange) wooden tokens with a food reward and then give it a choice between a token taken randomly from a glass jar containing a high proportion of black tokens and one from a jar containing a high proportion of orange – both offered in a closed fist – and it will sensibly choose the former, regardless of the actual number of black tokens in each jar. This is more than just counting – it shows an appreciation of probabilities. Who’s a clever boy then?
It’s no accident that pigeons have been stalwarts of animal behaviour studies for many decades. Aside from their famous navigational and homing abilities, they are fast learners, have a meticulous eye for detail and, it turns out, are particularly adept at assigning objects into categories. Bizarrely, they can be taught to distinguish paintings by Monet and Picasso and then attribute previously unseen works to the correct artist. They can even group together paintings belonging to the same artistic movement – Cubism or Impressionism, say.
Bees’ brains may be little but they can think big. Despite being endowed with only a hundred-thousandth as much grey matter as a human, these industrious insects can perform intellectual feats otherwise know only among vertebrates. New research, for example, shows that bumblebees are wired up to store mental models of objects that can be accessed by their various senses. This allows them to look at something and then recognise it in the dark just by feeling it, and vice versa.
combine words to convey novel concepts. “Open food drink” meant she wanted to get into the fridge, for instance. Is it language? Probably not. But it’s surely smart.
The crows of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific are top-notch tool-users. Not only are they able to manufacture a range of hooked implements from twigs and leaves and use them to prize insects from nooks and crannies, but they can make bespoke implements for specific tasks. They might produce a particularly long probe, for example, by pushing the end of one stick into another, hollow one. This is a skill that requires imagination as well as dexterity. And what’s more, they do it all without thumbs, let alone opposable ones.
Cephalopods are surely the geniuses of the molluscan world, and probably the invertebrate one. They might even give the brightest of vertebrates a run for their money. One of the many areas in which they excel is juggling social relationships. Cuttlefish communicate by changing the colour and texture of their skin. Remarkably, they can signal different messages to
At a Hawaiian sea-life park in the 1960s, trainers were running out of ideas for new tricks to teach their rough-toothed dolphins, so they wondered whether the animals possessed a natural creativity that could be harnessed to generate new ones. They started rewarding two animals, Malia and Hou, only for manoeuvres that