The truth is that almost all animals do not use technology at all. Tool-using animals make up less than 1 percent of species. But where the adoption of external objects to extend a creature’s abilities is limited in absolute numbers, there is a diversity that ranges across taxa: tool use has been documented in nine classes of animals—sea urchins, insects, spiders, crabs, snails, octopuses, fish, birds and mammals.
By the definition above—that a tool is an external object manipulated as a purposeful extension of the user’s body—it’s worth thinking about how the 1 percent extend their selves with technology. Here are some of the most thrilling examples.
Food Processors
Many animals use technology to gain access to food or transform it into something more palatable. The most common action is using rocks to crack or prize food from its natural container. Various macaques eat crabs and a smorgasbord of bivalve mollusks, cracking open the hard shells with rocks. They also select rocks specific to food type. Sea otters do much the same, while floating on their backs and using their own tummies as anvils. Capuchins, chimpanzees, mandrills and other primates crack nuts with stones, and some prize the edible bits from the shells with pointy sticks. Guinean chimps use rocks to smash and chop up the fruit of the treculia tree—which is as large as a football and just as tough.
Sticks are the most common technology used by many species, for poking, gouging, prizing, scratching, digging, dragging and probing. The doyenne of primate ethology Jane Goodall has been running a field station in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania for more than fifty years, and there was the first to observe a chimpanzee modifying a stick for subsequent use for food processing, in this case termite fishing. David Greybeard was his given name, and Goodall watched him stripping a sapling twig in 1960, and then dipping it into a termite mound. Perplexed, she tried it for herself, and saw that the termites cling to the stick; Mr. Greybeard was eating them. Chimps also use sticks to poke honey out of beehives, and to dislodge angry bees trying to defend their homes and grubs.
Orangutans like fish and appear to like to fish. Sometimes they scavenge them dead from river banks, but they have been seen poking sticks at fish in the shallows of rivers whereon they flop into their awaiting hands. They’ve also been seen trying, but so far failing as far as we have observed, to stab fish in ponds with tooth-sharpened sticks; this may be a behavior they have seen and copied from humans. If this is true, it is an example of a cultural trait not only being passed between individuals, but between individuals of different species.
Plumb Lines
Orangutans and Congolese gorillas both live in dense forests, often near pools or streams that they might need to cross. Of the great apes, only humans are habitual bipeds, meaning that we alone walk exclusively on our hind limbs. The other living great apes are habitual quadrupeds, knuckle walkers that are nevertheless capable of walking on their feet, but not for very long or very comfortably. Crossing water is not easy to do on four legs as your head might be below the surface, and potentially treacherous as the floor is neither visible nor flat. Both orangutans and gorillas have been seen selecting sticks and testing the depth and lay of the floor, to determine a path through which they are wading. The gorillas may also be using them as walking sticks for support as they traverse the uneven floors of pools and streams.
General Purpose
Leaves are important as well as sticks. Orangutans are more into leafy branches it seems and have been seen using leaves as gloves when handling spiny fruit, as hats when it’s raining, as cushions when sitting in spiky trees, and fashioning branches to aid masturbation. Gorillas brandish branches to ward off rivals before a fight kicks off. Chimps use layers of leaves as a kind of sponge from which they drink. Elephants carefully pull branches from trees with their trunks and use them to swat flies. The skincare regime of brown bears includes using barnacle-clad rocks for exfoliation when they are molting. In the simplest terms, these are all examples of animals using their inanimate environment to extend their own physical abilities. Whether they fashion these objects or merely use them as found, they all qualify as tools.