Stingrays Using Tools?

photo by Franklin Samir Dattein

In a December 2009 study, published in Animal Cognition, a group of researchers gave five stingrays a problem solving task. They put food in a plastic tube and challenged the stingrays to extract it. All five stingrays were able to extract the food by shooting water through the plastic tube. The researchers put a visual trick in the test, and only one stingray was able to figure it out before extracting his food. The other four successfully got their meals on the second try.

This is helpful to understand how other vertebrates understand things. According to the study, “performance in the instrumental task of retrieving food from a novel testing apparatus and the rapid learning in the subsequent discrimination/error correction task shows that cartilaginous fish can be used to study the origins of cognitive functions in the vertebrate lineage.”