From the octopus that stole fish from a tank to the monkeys that blackmail tourists for treats: How scientists have discovered the astonishing masterminds of the animal kingdom By Christopher Stevens For The Daily Mail Published: 19:00 EDT, 14 August 2024 | Updated: 19:41 EDT, 14 August 2024 e-mail View comments Clever Hans, a performing horse, drew amazed crowds wherever he went. With his owner Wilhelm, a maths teacher, he put on incredible displays of arithmetic, beating out the answer to sums with his hooves. Hans even appeared to be able to read, though sceptics insisted the horse was merely responding to signals given by Wilhelm, touring Germany before the First World War .
However the trick was done, neither the animal nor the teacher would have been surprised by news this month that horses are more intelligent than previously guessed. Researchers at Nottingham Trent University taught 20 horses to touch cards with their noses in return for treats. A system of lights was added: if the light was on, the treat was withheld.
All the horses quickly learned not to touch a lit card – which demonstrates, in psychological jargon, ‘an internal model of the world’. Smart though they undoubtedly are, horses are not the most intellectually gifted creatures in the animal kingdom. In fact, they’re not even in our top ten .
. . Cunning Crows These South Pacific birds also known as the New Caledonian Crow (pictured understanding water displacement) are known to be quite the problem solvers In an experiment at the University of Auckland in New Zealand , researchers took seven wild crows and set them a complex puzzle (pictured: a crow flying through the sky) All seven birds managed to do it on their first attempt with the record being set by a crow called Sam (pictured a separate crow creating a hook from twigs) These South Pacific birds, also known as qua-quas, are brilliant problem solvers.
In an experiment at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, researchers took seven wild crows and, after putting them in an aviary, set them a puzzle so complex it might have been inspired by a Heath Robinson cartoon. At one end of the aviary was a scrap of meat under a cover. To winkle it out, the birds needed to poke it with a long stick.
That alone would flummox most creatures – but the long stick was locked away, too, inside a cage. And to get that, the birds needed ..
. another stick! Hanging by a thread from their perch was a short piece of wood. To solve the problem and get the meat, each crow had to snap the thread, hold the short stick in its beak, drag the longer stick through the bars of the cage, then use that to retrieve the meat.
All seven birds managed to do it on their first attempt. The record was set by a crow called Sam, who spent less than two minutes examining the components and then completed every stage without making a mistake. The researchers called the results ‘incredibly surprising’.
In another experiment, birds brought a worm floating on the surface of a beaker of water into range by dropping stones into it to raise the water level. Professor Christian Rutz, who was part of a team at Oxford and Exeter universities investigating how the crows forage for food, believes these behaviours help them catch grubs and bugs that are richest in protein, which in turn gives their brains energy to develop. Crafty Macaques Long-tailed macaques are known for stealing items and holding them at ransom (Pictured: A wild macaque steals food from tourists in Chongqing, China) Usually the ransom price stands at one piece of banana or an orange segment for the safe return of possessions Three long-tailed macaques cuddling together during a hot day in Bali, Indonesia At the Uluwatu temple in Bali, long-tailed macaques are running a protection racket worthy of the Kray twins, stealing hats, sunglasses, bags and even shoes from tourists.
The monkeys demand a ransom, usually one piece of banana or an orange segment for the safe return of possessions. But the elders of the troop are craftier and greedier. Like old-school bank robbers, they specialise in high-value raids – and target smartphones.
Tourists will pay almost anything to get a phone back. One old male snarls at humans who offer him mere bananas: he refuses to return his booty for anything less than a giant chocolate bar. ‘The monkeys have worked out how to exploit us,’ wildlife film-maker Mike Gunton said.
‘The speed with which humanity is changing the world means evolution has to speed up too. It isn’t classical Darwinian evolution, the incremental physical changes over time. This is cultural evolution, and it is happening very fast.
’ Diligent Dogs The average dog has an intelligence equivalent to that of a two-year-old human, according to the University of British Columbia (pictured: a border collie) The research rates border collies as the smartest dogs, followed by poodles, German shepherds (pictured running through a field of flowers), golden retrievers and dobermans) A golden retriever playing with a ball on a beautiful sunny day in a lush green field (stock image) According to psychology professor Stanley Coren, of the University of British Columbia, the average dog has an intelligence equivalent to that of a two-year-old human. He must know some brainy toddlers because dogs can do everything from detecting contraband to raising the alarm when their owner is about to suffer an epileptic fit. And very few blind people would trust a two-year-old to walk them across a busy road.
Coren rates border collies as the smartest dogs, followed by poodles, German shepherds, golden retrievers and dobermans. He also argues that many dogs can count and do simple addition. In an experiment devised by researchers at Wofford College in South Carolina, a border collie called Chaser learned more than 1,000 words.
A 2011 paper in the journal Behavioural Processes reported that Chaser could accurately select and fetch many hundreds of toys and other items, learning the names for several new ones every day and remembering them consistently. In fact, she proved better than her trainers, who had to write the names on the toys to keep track of them all. Brainy Octopuses Some octopuses collect empty coconut shells to use as shelters.
If a predator approaches, they pull the shells around their bodies like armour (pictured: a common octopus) One species, the gloomy octopus, (pictured) uses stones, shells and even bottles to build a communal barricade around outcrops of rock Octopuses are also sneaky, with some even venturing out of their tank to nab fish in seperate locations (pictured: a close up of a common octopus) Some octopuses collect empty coconut shells to use as shelters. If a predator approaches, they pull the shells around their bodies like armour. It’s hardly surprising they’re so clever: they have nine brains, one in each tentacle and a central one that assimilates information from all the others.
One species, the gloomy octopus, uses stones, shells and even bottles to build a communal barricade around outcrops of rock, where they live in groups. Scientists found two of these ‘octopus cities’ in Jervis Bay, Australia, in 2017. They dubbed one Octopolis and the other Octlantis.
Octopuses are also crafty. Jon Ablett, of the Natural History Museum, says: ‘At one lab, all the fish were going missing from their tank. The staff set up a little video camera and it turned out that one of the octopuses was getting out of its tank, going to the other tank, opening it, eating the fish, closing the lid, going back to its own tank and hiding the evidence.
’ Deft Dolphins Bottlenose dolphins (pictured) use a cunning strategy to hunt and trap fish such as creating a mud barrier with their tails Dolphins leaping out of the water at Dolphin Research Center in March 27, 2023 (file image) In the shallows of the Florida Keys, bottlenose dolphins use a cunning strategy to hunt and trap fish. One swims in a tight circle, beating its tail on the silty seabed to stir up a ring of mushrooming mud. Fish caught in the circle start panicking and try to leap over the mud barrier .
.. straight into the waiting mouths of more dolphins.
This requires agility and perfect timing, probably aided by communication via the rattle of their clicking noises. Andrew Read, a biologist at Duke University in North Carolina, has suggested this behaviour is an adaptation of an earlier dolphin hunting trick, where one animal herds the fish (like a dog with sheep) towards others in the pod. It could also have its origins in a technique known as the ‘bubble net’, used by humpback whales: blasting air through their blowholes, they confuse shoals of fish and corral them into a tight ball before lunging in to eat their fill.
Shrewd Chimps Our closest animal relatives chimpanzees are amongst the most intelligent animals in the wild (pictured climbing high in the trees) A young Central Chimpanzee sitting on the ground holding its finger to its mouth Pan-hooting chimpanzee nestled in its natural habitat of Bissagos Islands, Guinea-Bissau (file image) The great apes, our closest animal relatives, are like us in so many ways. In Borneo during the 1970s, rescued orangutans watching humans washing in the river learned how to use soap and shampoo. Incredibly, this behaviour has spread to wild orangutans, which enjoy working up a lather on their arms and chests with stolen bars of soap.
Scientists have been performing intelligence tests with apes, mostly chimps and bonobos (also known as pygmy chimps), for a century or more. But observations made in the wild tell us more about their innate abilities. Researchers from the University of Zurich, studying groups of chimps at three national parks in Tanzania, discovered that different troops have different skills.
All three populations of chimps used twigs to poke into holes in the ground or into trees to extract ants, termites and other insects to eat, known as ‘ant dipping’. But it was only the chimps at the Tai reservation that used blades of grass, which were not as strong but could scoop up more insects at a time. The Tai apes also used stones to pound open nuts – a trick females did better than the males.
Wily Rats Decades of experiments with lab rats have proved they can recognise human faces, learn their way around complex mazes and operate levers to obtain food (pictured: a rat looking for food) Two curious brown rats hiding underneath a sofa (stock image) Decades of experiments with lab rats have proved they can recognise human faces, learn their way around complex mazes and operate levers to obtain food. They can even slow their heartbeats to get rewards. But a study by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute a couple of years ago went even further, using virtual reality devices to demonstrate that rats have imagination.
They can envisage places in their minds, even when they are in a different setting. This implies both consciousness and memory. The experimenters used brain sensors to monitor the rats’ neuron activity, scanning the hippocampus – the part of the brain that controls spatial reasoning.
The animals were placed in a 360-degree interactive virtual environment, a sort of video game for rodents. This digital space was modelled on one already familiar to the rats in the real world. By thinking about where they wanted to go, and running on a ball-like treadmill, the rats could navigate their way through virtual reality to find a reward.
Even when the imaginary journey was a long one, the rats stayed focused. ‘The stunning thing,’ said Dr Tim Harris, ‘is how rats learn to think about that place and no other place for a very long period of time, based on our perhaps naive notion of the attention span of a rat.’ A-star Bees Bees have distinct personalities, can recognise human faces as well as flowers, use simple tools, and solve problems (pictured: Bees collecting pollen) Bees (pictured pollinating a flower) are best known for their hive-mind which allows them to work as a team Bees have distinct personalities, can recognise human faces as well as flowers, use simple tools, and solve problems.
But they are perhaps best known for their so-called ‘hive mind’: if a problem is too difficult for one bumblebee to solve alone, others will weigh in with the benefit of their experience – just like humans. In an experiment at Queen Mary University, bees were presented with a tricky task to obtain a reward. By pressing a red lever, they could obtain a drop of sugar water.
But when the researchers blocked the red lever and rearranged things so that the water could be reached only by pressing a blue lever, none of the bees could figure this out alone. But the researchers showed some how it was done and, by patient observation, they learned the technique. Next, the educated bees were introduced to a group of novices.
Soon, the untrained bees had learned how to push both levers. Professor Lars Chittka said: ‘This kind of cumulative acquisition of knowledge, learning from previous generations, was thought to be unique to the human species. This challenges the traditional view that only humans can socially learn complex behaviour.
’ Bright Birds N’kisi the African grey was previously dubbed 'the cleverest parrot in scientific history' could apparently read his owner’s mind (a file image of another African Grey) The palm cockatoo in Australia (pictured perching on a branch) has been spotted using twigs as wedges, blades and scoops, to grab seeds from fruit Naturalists once thought that humans were the only species that had evolved to use tools. We now know that’s far from true. All sorts of creatures do it: sea otters, for instance, lie on their backs in the ocean and balance flat stones on their stomachs, to use as anvils – smashing shellfish open on them.
All over the world, seagulls drop clams onto hard surfaces to break them open. But parrots are the masters of tool use. The palm cockatoo in Australia can grasp a stick in its beak and drum it against a tree trunk, as part of its mating ritual.
And in a 2021 study, Goffin’s cockatoos were observed using three different kinds of twigs as wedges, blades and scoops, to obtain seeds from fruit. Perhaps the cleverest parrot in scientific history was N’kisi the African grey, a talker who was apparently able to read his owner’s mind. Aimee Morgana devised an experiment to illustrate this with biologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake after noticing that the bird often seemed to say words that corresponded to her thoughts.
In the test, carried out 149 times, Aimee would take a card from a sealed envelope. A word was written on the card, and she would silently concentrate on it for two minutes. N’Kisi appeared to pick up that word via telepathy and repeat it about 15 per cent of the time.
For example, when the word on the card was ‘hug’, N’Kisi said, ‘Can I give you a hug?’ The odds that this was a coincidence were calculated at 4,000 to one. Caring Elephants The world largest land mammal - the elephants - also has the biggest brains and can remember routes to watering holes over incredibly long stretches of time and space An elephant calf makes a splash as it tries to get a drink (pictured) The largest land mammals on earth, elephants also have the biggest brains and can remember routes to watering holes over incredibly long stretches of time and space. They are also renowned for their empathy, not only mourning their dead but sometimes even trying to bury their remains.
Elephants live in large social groups that continually split up and come back together – known as fission-fusion societies. To remain in contact, they use low frequency rumbles, a noise too low for the human ear to hear, which is generated from the pit of their stomachs and travels down through their legs. The vibrations can travel for more than five miles and be heard by other elephants, picked up through the sensitive soles of their feet.
These rumbles really make the earth shake – they can be up to 117 decibels, as loud as a chainsaw. Share or comment on this article: From the octopus that stole fish from a tank to the monkeys that blackmail tourists for treats: How scientists have discovered the astonishing masterminds of the animal kingdom e-mail Add comment.
