Dexterity in the Object Use of the Goffin’s Cockatoo

To understand tool use behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, it is crucial to not only focus on our close relatives but also on animals that developed similar behavioural traits completely independently from us. Researchers around Prof. Alice Auersperg have shown over the past decade that the Goffins cockatoo is one of the most sophisticated non-primate tool users. It uses and builds tool -based technologies rivalling the great apes, both in captivity as well as in the wild. These abilities persist despite lacking predispositions previously suggested to facilitate avian tool use such as complex nest construction or food caching. This suggests that their tool behaviour needs to be spontaneously invented as a solution to a problem in a primate-like fashion. We already understand a lot about what kinds of tool animals use but still very little about the mechanisms underlying such behaviour: how are they able to innovate tool use in the first place? Understanding different mechanisms underlying tool use across species is a major milestone for building towards a meaningful understanding of the emergence of technology. Thereby it is important to consider behavioural as well as physical barriers that animals face when using tools. This project aims to study a recent observation tool use by a naturalized population of birds inhabiting parks around Singapore. Urban cockatoos in Singapore face strong competition from other parrots and are thus forced to rely on difficult to open but widely available resources such as the Sea Almond. To facilitate foraging on Sea Almonds the birds developed two innovative strategies to extract the seed matter from the hard shells: The first entails making a tiny hole at the top and thereafter scraping out the seed content with a flat wooden splinter, that has been specifically manufactured for this purpose. The second is to also make only a small hole at the top and to thereafter stuff grass or leaves into the fruit until it cracks. The birds show a lot of overlap in those techniques, even so we know from previous research that they are not particularly good at learning from each other. Researchers thus aim to test to what extend the techniques employed by the birds are dictated by their morphology and the properties of the fruits that the tools are operated upon. Complementary, to this they plan to experimentally analyse if the tool use techniques invented by aviary cockatoos in Austria can also manifest in a predictable manner based on specific task properties. To achieve this behavioural analysis is blended with material physics to study the manifestation of a new tool discovery. The findings may help us to understand the onset and mechanisms underlying rare and newly discovered wildlife technology and to comprehend how similarities and differences between tool use modes emerge. This project is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the National University of Singapore.