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Crows may learn new skills from one another while ‘chatting’ over a meal - just like humans, suggests pioneering research.

Scientists set out to understand how information might spread among groups of tool-using New Caledonian crows.

The birds , which live on the remote island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, are well known for their ability to make and use tools to winkle insects out of their hiding places.

Study lead author Dr James St Clair, of St Andrews University , said: “Tool use is unusual in animals, and requires special knowledge.

“Individuals not only need to know how to make tools, but also where, when and how to actually use them.

“Crows could perhaps learn this sort of information from their neighbours, so we looked at how skills might spread among groups of birds.”

The researchers analysed the social interactions of the crows in their tropical habitat.

Each crow was fitted with a high-tech, miniature spy tag, weighing less than a £2 coin, which communicated with tags on other crows and provided a continuous record of who met whom at any given time.

It was the first time that such ‘proximity logging’ has been done with wild birds.

For the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, 41 crows were fitted with tags which were mounted onto the birds as ‘backpacks’ - using harnesses that degrade over time.

Over a 19-day period, more than 177,000 association logs were retrieved from 34 birds, with each log reporting bird-to-bird proximity and encounter duration.

After recording the crows’ encounters during ‘natural’ conditions, the scientists altered the environment to see how it would affect the social network.

Co-author Dr Christian Rutz said: “Because we were interested in tool-use behaviours, we reasoned that hard-to-reach food would bring the crows together, providing extra opportunities to learn new skills from one another.”

The team provided decaying timber full of wood-boring beetle grubs, which can also occur naturally when dead trees fall and break open.

Having recorded the social network before, during and after this experiment, the researchers then ran computer simulations to examine how information might spread.

Dr Rutz said: “We found that providing food has a similar effect to putting a coffee machine or water-cooler in an office - individuals aggregate around the resource, and the spread of interesting information is accelerated.”

Professor Rob Fleischer, of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the US, who led the genetic analyses, said: “It was exciting to see how non-family birds suddenly started aggregating under these conditions.”

Co-author Dr Dick James, a physicist and social network expert from Bath University , said: “By using tags to record actual associations, minute-by-minute, we were able to explore network dynamics over very short timescales.

“This, combined with the large volume of data that our tags delivered, brings the study of animal social networks a step closer to large-scale studies of human interactions, in which mobile phone data or Facebook posts are used to build incredibly detailed ‘friendship’ networks.”

It has been suggested that, like humans and some great apes, New Caledonian crows have technological ‘cultures’.

Scientists still don’t know how much of their tool-use behaviour crows learn from one another.

But the researchers said the new study showed that opportunities for information exchange abound, especially when important resources encourage crows to forage in the same place.