From Nautilus (via Marginal Revolution):

The Intelligent Life of the City Raccoon

Adapting to the urban jungle has made Rocky smarter.

BY JUDE ISABELLA OCTOBER 9, 2014 Toronto resident Simon Treadwell wheeled a garbage bin onto a snow-bound lot next to his property one evening this past winter. Inside the bin was a smelly mixture of wet and dry cat food, sardines, and fried chicken. Treadwell sprinkled some of the mix on and around the bin, made sure his three motion-activated night vision cameras were on, and went back into his house. Treadwell was testing a new lid latch he had devised in response to the city of Toronto’s request for proposals: The city needed help keeping raccoons out of people’s garbage. For over a decade, residents had been asked to place organic compostable materials such as vegetables, meat, bones, and even paper towels into green bins. But raccoons had learned to overturn the bins, causing the latches to give way when they hit the ground. And if the latches didn’t pop open, raccoons often fiddled with them until they did. The city wanted to upgrade its garbage bins so that they could resist raccoons, but still open easily when picked up by a garbage truck’s automated arm. Designs continue to be evaluated. “We’ve devised all sorts of ways of protecting our garbage, which all fail,” says Michael Pettit, an associate professor of psychology at York University, who has studied the history of animal behavior, including that of raccoons. The success of the city’s aggressive raccoons have struck fear into the hearts of Torontonians. Even Toronto Mayor Rob Ford confessed to the media that his family was too frightened to take out their trash. “Everyone I know has had to evict a raccoon from their house,” says Pettit. “Everybody has a raccoon story.” The early 20th-century researchers Lawrence W. Cole and Herbert Burnham Davis described raccoons’ cognitive abilities as closer to monkeys than to cats and dogs. Unlike many animals, raccoons “flourished rather than receded in the face of human expansion,” Pettit points out in an article for the American Psychological Association.1

I’ve lived in the San Fernando Valley, off and on, for 55 years. It was mostly farmland until a decade or so before that, then grazing land before that, then dry grassland before the 19th Century. My vague impression is that the type of animals that have flourished best in this evolutionarily novel environment are the smarter generalists, such as raccoons, coyotes, and, especially, crows, which seem more numerous than when I was young. Also, very smart Brazilian parrots, who didn’t show up until after a pet store truck overturned on the freeway around 1970, have managed to survive despite the winters being too cold for them. However, dumber-looking beasts like possums seem to be doing okay as well, so my theory may not be correct.

Part of the reason for their success may be that the urban environment has contributed to their intelligence. In humans, the effect is well known. Educational psychologist Walkiria Fontes has compared the cognitive abilities of rural and urban children on two metrics: crystallized intelligence, which is associated with experience, and fluid intelligence, which is the ability to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. She found that urban rich kids have the edge with both kinds of intelligence. But even poor urban students scored better than poor rural students in fluid intelligence. City raccoons also appear smarter than their rural counterparts. Suzanne MacDonald, a comparative psychologist who studies raccoon behavior at York University in Toronto, has compared the problem-solving skills of rural and city raccoons. The result? Urbanites trump their country cousins in both intelligence and ability. For the past few summers, she videotaped rural and urban racoons toying with containers baited with cat food. While both rural and city racoons readily approached familiar containers, they dealt differently with unfamiliar ones. Where rural raccoons took a long time to approach novel containers, city raccoons would attack them the moment she turned her back.

The city is an evolutionarily novel environment for raccoons, so the ones most likely to survive and thrive are the high g ones best at learning new behaviors.

As cities invent more complex latches and levers, they may actually be training raccoons to open them—and increasing their overall intelligence. Bill Dickens, an economist at Northeastern University, studies the g factor, a measure of general intelligence. “If they’re in a greatly enriched and cognitively demanding environment and if there are a bunch of traits that are more demanded by a city environment,” Dickens says, “they could all be enhanced together.” But with some luck, Treadwell’s invention may turn raccoons’ learning skills against them. His latch system requires an opposable thumb, something raccoons don’t have.

In other opposable thumb news:

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs

NEWS • Environment • Science & Technology • Science • Animals • ISSUE 36•30 • Aug 30, 2000 HONOLULU–In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins. … Thus far, all the opposable digits encountered appear to be fully functional, making it possible for dolphins–believed to be capable of faster and more complex cogitation than man–to manipulate objects, fashion tools, and construct rudimentary pulley and lever systems. “They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing,” said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California–San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. “Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry.” “My God,” Kuczaj added. “What are they doing down there?”‘

Another factor in selection of animals for living amidst humans is ability to get along with humans amicably. The bear on the California flag is a grizzly, but there aren’t any wild grizzlies left in California (the painting above is by Laura Cunningham, who specializes in paintings of extinct California megafauna). The San Fernando Valley where I live was full of giant grizzlies. The problem with grizzlies, as seen in Alaska, is they are unpredictably homicidal toward humans. Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man is about a former actor who managed to numerous survive summers living with Alaska grizzlies until a newcomer ate him.

So, Californians exterminated grizzlies. That created an opening for black bears, who migrated into California and are now quite numerous. Black bears get along with humans well, unless people violate the black bears’ reasonable set of rules, such as against playing with their cubs or having a candy bar in your sleeping bag.

Black bears are pretty good at learning new tricks. In Yosemite, the park rangers have to change the latches on the food storages bins at each campsite periodically because over the years enough bears learn how to open them. What I don’t know is whether bears teach themselves or is it possible they learn from each other (i.e., culturally)?

Chimps are extremely good at aping the behavior of others, but male chimps seem to be totally lacking in the urge to teach others useful skills.