© PLOS ONEIn an experimental recreation of "The Crow and the Pitcher" from Aesop's Fables, scientists found that crows actually do have a sophisticated understanding of water displacement.
Now scientists have evidence to back up that tale. New Caledonian crows actually do understand how to make water displacement work to their advantage, experiments showed. The results suggest that the birds are, at least in some respects, as smart as first-graders, according to the study.
Researchers led by Sarah Jelbert at the University of Auckland in Australia presented six crows with tubes filled with water. Inside the tubes, a worm or chunk of meat on a cork was floating, just out of reach of the crow's beak.
In front of the tubes, the researchers arranged a bunch of heavy rubber erasers that would sink, and light polystyrene objects that would float. In other variations of the experiment, the birds were presented with hollow and solid cubes.
The crows figured out that they could drop the heavy objects and the solid cubes into the tubes in order to raise the water level and get their snack, the researchers reported March 26 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Comment: The astronomers are disappointed because it's another nail in the coffin of their theories about how the Universe works.
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