Scientists view animal cognition not as a single ladder leading to human intelligence, but as a diverse collection of specialized skills evolved to solve specific survival problems. Cleverness is a broad term encompassing an animal’s capacity for learning, memory, problem-solving, and adapting its behavior to novel situations. Exploring the animal mind reveals sophisticated thought processes that challenge previous notions of high-level cognition.
Defining Animal Cleverness
The modern scientific approach defines animal cleverness using quantifiable cognitive metrics, moving past the limited measure of relative brain size. Learning capacity, the speed and flexibility with which an animal acquires new information, is a foundational measure of intelligence. Two widely used tests assess complex cognitive abilities like self-awareness and foresight.
The Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test, also called the mark test, examines an animal’s capacity for visual self-recognition. Researchers place an odorless mark on the animal that is only visible in a mirror. If the animal investigates the mark on its own body using the reflection, it suggests self-awareness. Only a few species pass this test, including great apes, bottlenose dolphins, Eurasian magpies, and Asian elephants.
The delayed gratification test assesses an animal’s ability to exert self-control by forgoing a small, immediate reward for a larger, later one. In “accumulation tests,” the reward increases over time, requiring the animal to wait for the maximum amount before eating. Certain species of corvids and primates, such as chimpanzees and Goffin’s cockatoos, demonstrate the capacity to wait for significant periods to maximize future gain.
Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between mental tasks or strategies in response to a changing environment, is an indicator of cleverness. This is often tested through reversal learning tasks, where an animal must unlearn a previously successful rule to embrace a new one. These controlled experiments show that cleverness is a suite of mental tools that allow an animal to navigate a dynamic world.
Problem Solving and Tool Use
The ability to manipulate objects to achieve a goal, known as tool use, demonstrates physical cleverness and causal understanding. Corvids, particularly the New Caledonian crow, display an exceptional understanding of tool mechanics. In one multi-step problem, individual crows used a short tool to retrieve a medium tool, which was then used to retrieve a long tool, finally reaching a food reward.
These birds also exhibit tool construction, requiring foresight and creativity. New Caledonian crows perform a three-stage process to create hooked-twig tools by selecting raw material, trimming the twig, and sculpting a hook end. Furthermore, some captive individuals spontaneously combined two or more non-functional, short elements to create a single functional “compound tool” long enough to access food.
Among primates, chimpanzees are known for their broad toolkit, including using stones as hammers and anvils to crack open hard nuts, a behavior passed down through social learning. In the Goualougo Triangle, chimpanzees fashion specialized “brush-tipped” sticks for extracting termites from mounds. Orangutans also show innovative problem-solving, such as using large leaves to construct temporary “umbrellas” to shield themselves from rain. Captive orangutans have demonstrated the ability to complete the initial steps of stone tool use, such as striking a hammer stone against a core, without prior training.
Complex Social Behavior and Communication
Cleverness also involves the ability to navigate intricate social structures, requiring communication, cooperation, and social learning. Cetaceans, including dolphins and whales, exhibit complex social behavior, often relying on coordinated strategies for survival. Humpback whales, for instance, coordinate to perform “bubble-net feeding,” where a group encircles fish by blowing a curtain of bubbles that requires precise timing.
Bottlenose dolphins show cultural transmission by teaching their young “sponging,” where they wear a marine sponge over their rostrum to protect themselves while foraging. Individual dolphins develop unique “signature whistles” that function as identity calls, acting as individual names within their social network. Killer whale (Orca) acoustic communication is complex; distinct pods possess unique dialects, and some groups exhibit stable, non-genetic behavioral patterns classified as culture.
In a striking example of interspecies cooperation, killer whales have been documented cooperatively hunting with Pacific white-sided dolphins by appearing to “eavesdrop” on the dolphins’ echolocation to locate Chinook salmon. The African Grey parrot provides an example of advanced cognitive communication through open-ended vocal learning, a trait shared with humans and a few other species. The famous parrot, Alex, demonstrated the ability to use acquired human words referentially, identifying more than 50 different objects and grasping abstract concepts like “same” and “different.”
Specialized Intelligence in Unexpected Species
Intelligence is not limited to mammals and birds, as demonstrated by cognitive abilities in evolutionary distant groups. The octopus, an invertebrate, shows problem-solving and behavioral flexibility that exemplifies convergent evolution. The veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) engages in defensive tool use by collecting and carrying halved coconut shells for later assembly into a protective shelter.
This behavior requires the octopus to anticipate a future need for shelter, a form of planning once thought to be the exclusive domain of vertebrates. In laboratory settings, octopuses quickly master multi-step puzzle boxes designed to access food, refining their technique with each subsequent attempt. Their camouflage is an active cognitive process, allowing them to rapidly match the texture and pattern of objects in their environment, a specialized skill requiring acute visual assessment and motor control.
Elephants, with their massive and complex brains, are renowned for their exceptional long-term memory, which is vital for their survival. Matriarch elephants serve as the living library for their herds, recalling the exact location of water sources and migration routes over vast distances and across decades. The survival rate of a herd directly correlates with the age and experience of its matriarch during drought, demonstrating the adaptive value of this sophisticated spatial memory. This intelligence is also evident in their complex social rituals, such as returning to the remains of deceased family members to mourn and touch the bones.