A Vending Machine? For Crows?
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 02.29.08
Our commander-in-chief Graham Hill, who is currently schmoozing it up with the intelligentsia at TED, just sent us a mysterious missive from his BlackBerry: "Makes vending machines to give crows peanut in return for Crow makes hook with wire. Amazing vid."
We were able to decrypt his message only with help from Boing Boing. The gist? A tech hacker named Joshua Klein has constructed a vending machine that teaches crows to deposit coins in exchange for some juicy peanuts. Klein discovered that the smart and adaptable avians would place the nuts on the road so that cars would run over them and crack them open. That's not even the most astonishing part of this experiment. The birds would then wait for the traffic signal to change, before picking up their food.
Before you ask, yes, there's a point to all this.
Klein is hoping to eventually train crows to perform search and rescue (though of what, we're unclear), or to collect garbage. Another idea he has is to place one of his vending machines in a theme park to help people regard crows as more than just vermin, while increasing the birds' cognitive abilities.
Boing Boing describes how Klein trains the crows:
His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them.
We're still looking for the vid.
hmmm another get rich quick scheme.......
Yes, there is an evolutionary sensibility to this behavior.
Crows have been observed to follow wolf packs, ranging out ahead to find unhealthy or snow bound moose, and then calling the wolves to follow them toward prospective prey, awaiting their leftovers once the wolves have eaten their fill of meat.
What I think is fascinating about this is that the behavior translates so easily to vegetable foods - with humans as providers instead of wolves.
Subtext: when I was a kid, small town zoos often had black bears which you could buy "soda pop" for. Put a quarter in a machine, open up the "Orange Crush" and slide the bottle down a chute. The bear would grab it up with both paws and guzzle it down in seconds, spilled soda stuck to his chest with flies swarming to the sweetness. The bears so liked it in the hot summer that they would bellow plaintively to beg for more, to which children would respond by begging their parents for money. And no caffeine or corn syrup in those days! In retrospect a disgusting spectacle but illustrates the interspecies dependencies nonetheless.
No video but here's a pic of them in action:
http://www.tk421.net/lotr/film/fotr/img/fotr0921.jpg
But seriously, folks; I was thinking of the exactly the same application before I read anything after the jump. Float a large barge, peanuts stored below, rookery above, out into the Pacific gyre, have these fellas pick up all the plastic within reach of the surface. It'd work better if the seagulls could be trained, instead of standing around worthlessly like they are in the above picture. Now if we could only find a smart species of fish that would work cheap. And not get suffocated by having plastic wrapped about it.
if you dont run the system 100% of the time and ensure young crows find their dependance, i think its a great idea.
100s of crows see the system wave its green flag and they all fly off into the city and pick up ciggrette butts and return them for a tiny snack
then it can move onto other common pieces of trash like plastic bags, maccas bags, straws, candy wrappers. then they prolly will learn to do all of them at once.
of course the city would have to move to crow proof bins or theyd just be running to the garbage pit to source their plunder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihdP3b6LXw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihdP3b6LXw
I feel entitled to be silly since I found the real video for you.
Sparklies are OK, but watch out for the ribbon and Dragon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zxx0CP6FDk
I think they need to research what makes crows so intelligent. My guess that it is not so much the size of the brain, but how it is wired that gives them this ability. That kind of research may lead to breakthroughs in understanding human learning disorders.
I wonder if crows would teach their young the tricks they learned. Don't some apes do that? If we taught them to pick up cigarette butts etc and the crows taught their young, we'd have a perpetual fleet of helpers (so long as the peanuts held out).
Those are not Crows, they are Ravens.....
Now if only it were possible to teach humans not to drop cigarette butts and other trash in the first place...
Crows do teach their young the tricks they use. The crows on the island of New Caledonia teach their young how to use tools to retrieve grubs from trees - it is quite amazing to watch. Check out David Attenborough's "The Life of Birds" for the video.