Naked Science Forum

Life Sciences => Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution => Topic started by: evan_au on 08/10/2022 01:30:18

Title: What other Innovation Arms Races do you know, between humans & animals?
Post by: evan_au on 08/10/2022 01:30:18

A recent story in TNS podcast talked about the innovation arms race in Sydney between cockatoos (a kind of parrot) and humans (a kind of hominin) and their wheelie bins (a kind of garbage bin).
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/cockatoos-become-bin-raiding-menace

The story mentioned the lack of similar examples in the literature (apart from squirrels and bird-feeders), so I thought we could pool some ideas...

To start off: One that springs to mind is the complexity of opening garbage bins in Alaska. The bears are very good at opening garbage bins.

I heard of one ranger who said "there is an overlap between the intelligence of the brightest bears and the dumbest tourists...".

So perhaps Yogi Bear might be another documented case? (but kids cartoons are not peer-reviewed scientific literature...)

Title: Re: What other Innovation Arms Races do you know, between humans & animals?
Post by: Zer0 on 08/10/2022 16:22:36

I'm not sure if this fits in or is relevant to the OP.

Copyrights & Credit/Courtesy - BBC/YouTube.

P.S. - sorry if i got this wrong.

Title: Re: What other Innovation Arms Races do you know, between humans & animals?
Post by: alancalverd on 08/10/2022 23:38:19

In my youth, whole milk was delivered to your doorstep in glass bottles with foil caps. Blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) would  peck through the caps and drink the cream. Somehow they learned that the thickest cream was in the gold-top bottles (full-cream milk) and rarely attacked the red (homogenised) or silver (semiskimmed) ones. So the dairies changed the codes, using various stripes to denote the quality of the content. In every case, within a week all the birds in a district had learned the new code and attacked the full-cream bottles only.

This story has gone into scientific folklore as a prime example of sophisticated communication but I wonder if it was due to human stupidity rather than avian intelligence?   Dumb humans were fixated by the cap color, but the bottles were clear glass, so whatever the code, you could see the thickness and color of the cream layer from the side......

Title: Re: What other Innovation Arms Races do you know, between humans & animals?
Post by: Colin2B on 09/10/2022 18:15:53

Quote from: alancalverd on 08/10/2022 23:38:19

Blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) would  peck through the caps and drink the cream.

There have been reports of blue tits entering roosts of hibernating bats and pecking at them, even through skull to eat brains.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/sep/09/great-tits-hunting-bats