Evidence of tool use in a seabird.

ABSTRACT: Documenting novel cases of tool use in wild animals can inform our understanding of the evolutionary drivers of the behavior's emergence in the natural world. We describe a previously unknown tool-use behavior for wild birds, so far only documented in the wild in primates and elephants. We observed 2 Atlantic puffins at their breeding colonies, one in Wales and the other in Iceland (the latter captured on camera), spontaneously using a small wooden stick to scratch their bodies. The importance of these observations is 3-fold. First, while to date only a single form of body-care-related tool use has been recorded in wild birds (anting), our finding shows that the wild avian tool-use repertoire is wider than previously thought and extends to contexts other than food extraction. Second, we ex

SUBMITTER: Fayet AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6983420 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature