ArticleiScience2025
Evidence of self-care tooling and phylogenetic modeling reveal parrot tool use is not rare.
Article in iScience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Leveraging social media and other online data to study animal behavior.PLoS biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Putatively rare behaviors like tool use are difficult to study because absence of evidence can arise from a species' inability to produce the behavior or from insufficient research. We combine data from digital platforms and phylogenetic modeling to estimate rates of tool use in parrots. Videos on YouTube revealed novel instances of self-care tooling in 17 parrot species, more than doubling the number of tool-using parrots from 11 (3%) to 28 (7%). Phylogenetic modeling suggests 11-17% of extant parrot species may be capable of tool use and identifies likely candidates. These discoveries impact our understanding of the evolution of tool use in parrots, revealing associations with relative brain size and feeding generalism and indicating likely ancestral tool use in several genera. Our findings challenge the assumption that current sampling efforts fully capture the distribution of putatively rare animal behaviors and offer a fruitful approach for investigating other rare behaviors.
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Registered trials
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