Talk:Tool use by non-humans

Other borderline case
Would washing food in water be worth mentioning as a borderline case? While the water isn't being held, the food is being held & processed by placing it in water, and you could certainly consider the water to be a tool to an end. Blythwood (talk) 22:55, 7 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi. This article is a bit of a definition nightmare.  My immediate reaction is that food washing is not tool because nothing is manipulated, however, I think that archer fish squirting water is very likely to be tool use.  Help! Next opinion please... DrChrissy (talk) 23:15, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. I suppose I see tool use as notable if an animal figures it out - for an archer fish squirting water is nothing unusual, but (say) a macaque figuring out fruit will taste nicer with the mud rinsed off it is interesting. Blythwood (talk) 23:29, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 * (I further indented your edit - I hope you don't mind). The problem here is that the Macaque might not be figuring out anything at all.  They may see their parents performing this behaviour and then copy them, all the time (so it is no more unusual than the archer fish squirting water) but without ever figuring out what the washing does.  This is sometimes called "suspicious behaviour" in the animal behaviour literature.  The archer fish are actually doing something complex - they have to adjust for refraction of light at the water surface, movements of the prey, etc.  The whole notion of tool use by animals is complicated by the concept of animal consciousness and whether this is required for the behaviour. DrChrissy (talk) 00:00, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Article seems to be an indiscriminate list of questionable items
just one example:


 * Another incidence of play in birds has been filmed showing a corvid playing with a table tennis ball in partnership with a dog.[113]

The video shows a human playing. Neither the dog nor the bird are playing. The dog isn't doing anything, and the bird seems slightly annoyed at the human throwing the ball at it.--345Kai (talk) 23:44, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
 * How are you defining "play"? DrChrissy (talk) 16:20, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Unnecessary caption
The captions on the "Series of photographs showing a bonobo fishing for termites" are worthless. For example, what's "Stage 3", and why does it look like "Extracting the insects"? (the bonobo is eating insects) Stage 2 is also extracting insects. My point is, they're not very descriptive, and I know all I need to know from the title alone.  User:Dunkleosteus77 &#124;push to talk 00:07, 7 June 2016 (UTC)
 * OK, I really do not feel that strongly about this, so let's keep it captionless. DrChrissy (talk) 15:27, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

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inintelligible sentence
I don't understand this sentence that appears in the third paragraph: Crows are among the only animals that create their own tools. What's that supposed to mean? Crows are not the only ones. But they are among the only ones? So, there are a lot of only ones?--Calypso (talk) 18:56, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Need references
Darwin mentioned tool use by Baboons. Cool, but doesn’t that whole paragraph need citations? I want to dig deeper. Pauldemello (talk) 16:22, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Tool use by crabs
Is it worth mentioning tool use by crabs in the article? Some obvious examples being Hermit Crabs using found shells or Lybia using sea anemones for defense. A few viral videos also showed crabs defending themselves from humans using kitchen knives.

Freezepond (talk) 23:39, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Agricultural science
Elephant tools 197.255.254.76 (talk) 16:48, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Worth mentioning disproved cases?
I am new to editing wikipedia, and am a casual editor. I just changed the Reptiles section to reflect a 2019 study that disproved the results of a 2013 study documenting tool use in crocodilians. As such, the reptiles section now only includes the disproving of this study, due to the 2013 study being the only reported case of tool use in reptiles. Should "Reptiles" even be included? Or should a "disproved cases" section be added to the article? Stufisk (talk) 19:15, 1 January 2024 (UTC)