Smart lab rats filmed using hooked tools to get chocolate cereal

[n2doc]

Some rodents have a sweet tooth. And sometimes they need to be crafty to get their sugar fix.

Rats may have the right idea: they have been filmed for the first time using tools, such as hooks and rakes, helping them to reach a chocolate cereal treat. The feat is a manifestation of their critter intelligence and gets them into a rather exclusive club of tool users.

Akane Nagano and Kenjiro Aoyama, at Doshisha University in Kyotanabe, Japan, trained eight common, brown rats to pull small hooked tools to obtain cereal that was otherwise beyond their reach.

In one experiment, they gave the rats two similar tools, just one of which worked well for food retrieval. The rodents quickly learned to choose the correct tool for the job, selecting it 95 per cent of the time (Animal Cognition, doi.org/br48).

more
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109999-smart-lab-rats-filmed-using-hooked-tools-to-get-chocolate-cereal/

[jimlup]

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