Hang Seng

Picture a northwestern crow soaring to great heights, scanning coastal British Columbia for his breakfast treats. The crow loves Japanese littleneck clams the most. Once the crow locates the target molluscs, it picks up speed to dive-bomb at the mudflats and dig the clams out of the sticky ooze with their beaks.

The next code to crack is opening the shell without clam opener and forks. That's how the crow does. Shortly after flying with the heavy shells, the crow drops the clams on the nearby rocks. The trick works magic like shouting "open sesame." In case it doesn't work the first time, the crow retrieves it, flies it up in the air again, and drops it the second time. The third time. The fourth or even fifth time.

I'd never seen birds so clever in my entire life. I just heard this story from two Simon Fraser University scientists. The two scientists took a closer look at the crows and noticed something strange. The crows would occasionally drop the shell and leave it behind. Why on earth should a crow work so hard to dig up perfectly delicious clams only to abandon them halfway? One simple reason is the rejected clams were too small to warrant that much efforts to extract the breakfast. Another reason, to my dismay, is some scrounger crows simply lurk near the rocks to sweep in and steal the buffet meal. 

Think about the field "bioinspiration", and we can turn to these crows and learn from their knowledge gained over evolutionary time. We can think of those clam hunting behaviour as our money earning strategy or we can think of the scrounger crows as our thieves. Either way, it is irrefutable that we can learn a lot from them. Less experienced ones –  be they crows or humans – are vulnerable to be stolen. My family has had such bad experience, when the bank account password was stolen and cracked recently. Like a scrounger crow with free meal, the scammer took our money. Fighting back was less easy than what I'd expected. If you thought reporting to police immediately and the transaction could be halted, think twice. This is bad luck if you happened to have chosen a bank without heart to protect the customers, like us. Our bank customer service – and even if you wish not to call this a service at all – refused to disclose the account number of the scammer to the police.

My goodness, that is even worse than an animal. It's unprecedented. In all of human history. Shameful as it is to say, that's the worst bank service. 

Be warned.