Our new emerging field within the excellence initiative of the @fwf-at.bsky.social will look into the process of innovation across apes, parrots, corvids and embodied artificial agents with @mohara.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social @christophvoelter.bsky.social
2/2 On the left, Alice Auersperg (@auersperga.bsky.social) with Veronika and her new fancy broom.
On the right is a photo of me with the ever-great Witgar Wiegele.
Bravo Ondrej!!
This is who runs this account
Naked scientist Podcast with Veronika: www.thenakedscientists.com/podcasts/nak...
Cover girl Veronika is making headlines across the globe🐂
(animal cleverness trumps human stupidity)
Notably, she is a 'companion cow' not used for meat or dairy.
Maybe if we saw other creatures less as a means to an end, we could appreciate their richness better...
www.cell.com/current-biol...
I have prepared a video summarizing the study. Please come back here after reading the thread : )
youtu.be/bAk4PFEuWKQ English
also
youtu.be/CETjjZBMT5c Spanish
youtu.be/tkpjlCxDJZA German
(Thanks to Esau Dharma for providing the Spanish voice for Witgar Wiegele!)
Die klügste #Kuh der Welt: Veronika aus Kärnten verblüfft mit ihrem intelligenten Gebrauch von Werkzeugen. Ihr spezialisierter Besengebrauch wird von Kognitionsforschenden untersucht. #FWF-funded @auersperga.bsky.social @biotay.bsky.social 🐮
via @derstandard.at
www.derstandard.at/story/300000...
Last week I had the privilege of speaking with @auersperga.bsky.social and @biotay.bsky.social about a very talented cow. She's called Veronika, she's fabulous and she's currently getting a lot of well-deserved attention. Here's my piece for @iflscience.com:
www.iflscience.com/we-didnt-eve...
Cows itch, just like us. But Veronika the cow takes things into her own hands. Or rather: into her mouth.
Scientists say it’s the first experimentally verified instance of cattle using a tool. https://wapo.st/3NzJ84A
Cow Tools!
We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years.
We breed them and exploit them
It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS
Here I describe our study
(paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social
with @auersperga.bsky.social
Veronika‚s Story in the New York Times www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/s...
The perfect story to take your mind off other news:
Veronika, a cow in Austria, has been documented not only using a tool - a broomstick - but using it in different ways to scratch different parts of her body. 🧪 #animals #animalbehavior #intelligence
www.livescience.com/animals/land...
No bull: nice article about our study by David Grimm | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
Verrückter Fakt des Tages #vfdt
heute hochaktuell:
Veronika, eine Kuh aus Kärnten, verwendet offenbar gezielt und überlegt Werkzeuge. Sie zeigt ein Niveau von Werkzeugnutzung, das man bisher nur von Schimpansen kannte.
science.orf.at/stories/3233...
Thanks ! It was entirely accidental. Someone alerted us to Veronika after I had published a book on animal innovation.
Veronika does not only scratch her body. She may also scratch at our assumptions about the cognitive limits of livestock.
Veronika is 13 years old and has been kept as a pet rather than for production by the farmer and baker Witgar Wiegele. She has never been trained to use tools. Since the age of four, she has spontaneously picked up natural twigs from her pasture and has since markedly refined her technique.
She uses the bristled end of a deck brush on her back and hindquarters, using repeated place-and-pull motions. For more sensitive areas such as the belly flap, udder, and anal region, she switches to the stick end, using careful, repeated poke-and-lift movements. See video link: youtu.be/bAk4PFEuWKQ
Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
New Messerli Professorship available: www.nature.com/naturecareer...
A fun and informative video by @zefrank.bsky.social (True Facts) about our research on Goffin's cockatoos!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq9J...
Our new theoretical paper on combinatory tool use origins is out !
with @raccoonologist.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
I had the honour of working to bring @auersperga.bsky.social’s baby to life. It’s a VERY heavy baby - over 200 references (and yes I read them all) - but necessary to do justice to our new hypothesis of combinatory tool use origins 📝👶🛠️
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
How do curiosity and surprise intersect following a violation of expectation? Read our paper here🔥
@auersperga.bsky.social @ivojacobs.bsky.social @elifduran.bsky.social
I love the beak-foot coordination in this
New paper out today w @dalmaijer.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social and @lucymaplin.bsky.social as part of the Phil Trans special issue doi.org/10.1098/rstb.... Over 2 years, we studied a population of cockatoos thought to be the source of the innovation of bin-opening.
Highlight of my day: Steve Novella from my fave podcast @theskepticsguide.bsky.social saw right through this immediately. The issue here is definitional and you can almost claim any object is tool use with the current definitions - which is why ”tooling“ is a better framework to study the phenomenon
Beyond criterion: cognitive flexibility in wild striated caracaras: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... | #BiologyLetters #Behaviour #Cognition #Ecology
Highly recommended! I just finished a cover-to-cover read, and it's a great addition to the avian sensory ecology literature with excellent discussions of the links between brain & behavior. I prefer reading paper books (better retention) but the whole thing is freely downloadable! bit.ly/482xPZm 🦉🧠
