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Anonymous
I've been reading up recently about how amazingly smart crows are.

I used to think that humans and apes (and maybe dolphins) were on this god tier of animal intelligence and nothing else came close, then I read about these crows bending wires into hooks to fish food out of things and shit, even being smarter tool users than chimps in some regards.

So you have to wonder, if birds can be so smart and it's not just some quirky miracle of evolution, why aren't there a fuckton of smart tool using talking animals running around?

It's got to be amazingly useful for survival to be smart, so why aren't more animals smarter than they are?
>> Anonymous
Evolution of intelligence needs very special conditions. The right kind of animal must have the right kind of diet in the right kind of environment. For instance elephants pass the mirror test of consciousness and they have very useful trunks, but they have no reason to use tools. There are also animals that have evolved tool use through instinct rather than learning, because they lack the brainpower to just be creative and learn from each other. Generally having a brain proportionally as big as ours (or that of apes, corvids, dolphins or parrots) is merely a liability for an animal that has other, more efficient survival mechanisms.

There is of course an apparent trend of intelligence growins slowly through time. In the Cretaceous dinosaurs and mammals were pretty much equals in the brains-department, and today... corvid dinosaurs and primate mammals are again pretty much equals in smarts. I bet there are going to be even more intelligent species in the far future, unless we manage to kill all of their would-be-ancestors.
>> Anonymous
I've seen a bird throwing bread crumps on the sea in order to catch fish.
Also some voltures break huge eggs using stones.
>> Anonymous
People underestimate the intelligence of most animals, just because they don't do flashy tricks that impress us doesn't mean they aren't intelligent. Even so, humans ARE on a godlike tier of intelligence compared to every other animal out there.
>> Anonymous
>>187608
The baiting bird is a green heron. They apparently have to learn the bait use by themselves and don't learn it from others, so only few individuals use the trick.

The rock-using vulture is the Egyptian vulture, but the use of tools is innate in this case, not a learned thing.
>> Anonymous
We had a crow that smoked a long time ago. Someonwhat problematic when he'd steal a lit cig, smoke it for a bit, then store it somewhere safe for later.

Like the wodden shingles we had on the roof.

I have no idea if it was trained, or got addicted from second hand exposure, or why it didn't die from smoking. It died from getting bopped on the head after it decided it wanted my toenails for itself (my age was measured in months, rather than years at the time).