Bears and tools

[milkweed]

Interesting incident at the MN zoo monday morning, witnessed by many people. When I first heard the story, I chuckled to myself and thought "So the bear used a tool".

A grizzly bear at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley picked up a basketball-sized rock with both front paws Monday morning and repeatedly slammed it into a pane of glass, shattering the barrier as startled patrons stood on the other side.

http://www.startribune.com/minnesot...ne-shattering-it-like-a-windshield/311777801/

I am pretty sure these are Brown bears and not grizzly. The bears were orphaned so it wasnt learned behavior. So I thought I would check a bit. Sure enough other reports of tool use and bears is out there. This is interesting:

http://www.livescience.com/47603-grizzly-bear-tool-use-study.html

So the captive bears figured it out and not the wild bears (though the article does not say how old the bears where when taken out of the wild).

So did they figure this out via watching people using ladders?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

So did they figure this out via watching people using ladders?

Bears are both highly intelligent and quite lazy. This is the perfect combination to encourage an animal to experiment with tool-making.

The ability to walk bipedally, freeing the hands for other activities, is also an advantage.

 

[milkweed]

Bears are both highly intelligent and quite lazy. This is the perfect combination to encourage an animal to experiment with tool-making.

The ability to walk bipedally, freeing the hands for other activities, is also an advantage.

But there are few reports of this in the wild (as far as I know) unlike other tool using animals such as chimps/raven etc. The bears in MN were captive as were the others in the WA study. I dont know if Lyn Rogers ever reported such things with his black bear studies in northern MN.

So the idea must have come from watching people, which is taking another species habits and incorporating it into their own behavior - to achieve a result that had not been demonstrated by people. No one taught that bear to pound glass with a rock, let alone go into the water to get the rock so he could pound the glass. The other part I find intriguing is the attack on the glass, what caused the outburst? People often behave poorly in zoos, attempting to get an animals attention, but this was behind glass so the tapping or attention attempt would have been (for the bear) the same crap, different day.

And while being semi-bipedal, that in itself does not seem to be a prerequisite for tool use.

 

[Beer w/Straw]

Maybe the bear didn't want to hurt his hands.