Jolyon Troscianko recently won first prize in the ‘concepts’ category of the BBSRC’s photo competition. His winning photo is of a New Caledonian crow probing into a tube for prey, the novel aspect of the shot is that it is taken from the perspective of the bird’s prey from deep inside a log.
New Caledonian crows use stick tools for ‘fishing’ wood-boring beetle larvae out of their burrows in decaying tree trunks. They tease the larvae by repeatedly poking them with a tool, encouraging them to defend themselves and bite the tool-tip with their powerful mandibles. Once firmly attached to the tool, the crows carefully withdraw the larvae from their protected burrows. Motion-triggered video cameras recently revealed that individual crows may take years to become proficient at mastering the subtleties of this extraction technique (Bluff et al. 2010, Proc. R. Soc. B). The winning image is a still taken from film showing this unique predator-prey relationship from the larva's perspective.
