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Ravens are known to be smart and IFLScience has a good summary of a new study which shows ravens recognize cheaters and won't trust them to the extent of refusing to cooperate with them if they have been cheated badly enough, and also that the cheaters were likely to try to cheat again if given another chance.
Nine young ravens, six of them male and three female, were gradually familiarized with the experimental setup before first being put through 600 trials where they got to freely choose who to cooperate with. Later through a few hundred more trials in total each raven was tested on the same task with each other raven in turn (i.e. no free selection of cooperation partner) as well as on their own to see if they would try the same experiment even when cooperation and success was impossible. They also tried to test for the importance of a raven observing the cooperating partner during the trial with much poorer results showing that while the ravens often cooperated successfully in the previous trials most of them hadn't really understood the details of how the cooperation — or the experiement or both — worked.
The ravens were shown to be the most successful when they were in pairs of one male and one female and also when there was a larger difference in the hierarchy of dominance between the cooperating ravens. The success rate for self-selected pairs was 66.2% while the success rate for assigned partners was only 27.3%. 84.38% of the ravens pulled the string in the control trials without a partner where it could not result in a reward (then again it seems there was nothing lost by trying and no reason why they shouldn't try even on the slimmest chance it might work even if they realized it shouldn't).
Link to the full paper "Tolerance and reward equity predict cooperation in ravens" in Nature, also available as a PDF (635 KB). It's eleven pages long and filled to the brim with information.
The most surprising to me is that ravens apparently love cheese :)
Hat tip to Schneier's blog which mentioned the story.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday October 28 2015, @06:54AM
If I remember correctly, ravens are also the only species other than humans that are known to both make and use tools to accomplish tasks. Using "tools" is not as impressive (seals opening clams with rocks), but making tools specifically to solve a problem (ravens bending wires to extract food) takes a certain degree of intelligence.
A more cynical approach would be to apply the same standard to humans: people who only know how to use tools (buying ready-made appliances) vs those who make tools (DIY, or MacGyvering with what's on hand).
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(Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday October 28 2015, @07:10AM
Reminds me of the BBC show "Connections". It tells how each invention leads to the next, throughout the history of man.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @05:47PM
Arguably buying an appliance is making a 'tool' with the resource 'money'. Some animals understand exchange (crows) while others don't (Otters, I'm pretty sure you mean otters, not seals. Seals don't use rocks to open clams).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @02:04AM
The entire crow "family" (actually, a genus) [wikipedia.org] is considered to be quite bright.
In the earliest days of S/N, we had a story [soylentnews.org] that referenced how Aesop included the problem-solving adaptability of a crow in one of his fables circa 620 BCE.
...and, had you included all primates instead of limiting things to just humans, that would have been a better comparison.
Chimps have been seen "fishing" for termites and using rocks to open nuts as an example.
Some birds drop shellfish on rock outcroppings from altitude to bust them open.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday October 30 2015, @12:08AM
>Chimps have been seen "fishing" for termites and using rocks to open nuts as an example.
>Some birds drop shellfish on rock outcroppings from altitude to bust them open.
And had you read my comment, you would have known that I specifically exclude "using tools" from "making tools". Unless chimps are fashioning hammers with handles to open nuts, or non-raven birds sharpening rocks before dropping things on them, I think my original comment is fairly accurate (seals != otters notwithstanding).
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(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday October 29 2015, @07:18PM
Possibly somewhat off topic, but I used to use ravens as alarm clocks when I want to be up at first light. I would toss a chunk of bread or other edible up on the roof and would be awakened by them stomping around when they discovered it. Apparently they are so used to traps that they stand at a distance in a circle around any discovered large food item and one at a time hop in, take a quick peck then quickly jump backwards. This goes on until they at least one is satisfied it is safe, grabs it and flies off. You would be amazed at how loud a bunch of ravens hopping up and down on the roof can be.