You Wouldn't Believe That These Animals Can Do Maths (Part 2)

Do you find our last article about animals with abilities to do maths interesting? Here are some more for you.

Bees Count Their Way Home

Do you ever wonder how the bees could always go in the right direction to their home? When the worker bees get out of their hives to look for food, it seems like they always know the correct ways to get back to their places, no matter how twisty and far they have been from their home. They undoubtedly look for landmarks, but how could they do that?

The State University of New York at Stone Book conducted a study and did an experiment to explain the reason behind that. They found that bees indeed count landmarks as they passed by to know which way to go back home. To verify that, the scientists set up lots of tents that certain bees will fly past to get to their food. However, before those bees flying back to their hives, they added one more tent, or in several cases, they removed one tent. And as a result, the bees struggled to return to their home, either stopping short or traveling too far off. If there are 4 tents sat between the bees and their goal, they would travel back 4 tents invariably, and that means they did all the navigation due to their math skills.

Guppies Travel for Safety

A study conducted in 2012 about guppies and it found that even the really small fish which is known for traveling in groups are capable of doing maths.

In the study, individual guppies were placed in an open tank and observed which shoal of guppies each of them would join. Usually, the guppies would join the larger shoal when the whole shoal of fish appeared at once. However, when a fish passed others by one at a time, it had to count each passing individual on either side. Interestingly, the guppy always managed to skip the smaller shoal and choose the bigger one, even when they couldn’t see the whole shoal. And they did that by counting and remember. For a fish with such a small brain, this is truly remarkable.

Ai, the Chimp who could Add

A primatologist from Kyoto University named Tetsuro Matsuzawa spent a couple of years on research on chimpanzee intelligence. The female chimpanzee in his research named AI has shown the world her amazing talent for counting. For a few decades now, she spent her time on a monitor and a series of dots with the value that represents the quantity of dots. Two dots? She will click “3”. She first started with differentiating between “1” & “2”, but she has long surpassed that level.

This study has shown that our closest relatives do have the capability of doing maths, and that isn’t just a concept that is only for humans.

Alex–One Smart Bird

Alex is a parrot whose owner is an animal psychologist named Irene Pepperberg, is one of the most notable examples of avian intelligence that are observed by scientists. Irene was very close to her parrot. Over its 30-year lifespan, she has taught the bird reading, language, and maths skills that very few people would believe a bird could do.

The counting method of Alex is the most well-known one. Irene placed a group of different shaped and different coloured blocks in the cage with the parrot and asked it to count the number of a specific type of blocks. Six is the maximum value that Alex can count. It is remarkable that Alex could identify by name different categories of color and shape, but it is even more remarkable that she could add the number.

But that is not it; he could even comprehend basic addition. He was revealed in one of the last studies about him to be capable of addition problems. When he was reaching the end of his life, Alex was reported to comprehend Arabic numerals up to 8 in the form of large multi-coloured magnets and it was tested to make sure that was not a chance.

Alex was among the limited number of animals that had the ability to do maths. He even demonstrated his ability in the public many times before his death. The bird demonstrated an unprecedented sense of intelligence as well as meta-cognition that we have never seen in an avian. Before Alex died from heart failure, he told his owner that “Be good. See you tomorrow. I love you”.

Monkeys vs College Students

In 2007, a study conducted at Duke University in the form of maths challenge is probably the most definitive evidence that animals could do maths. The study involved 4 college students and they were put in a room with 2 rhesus monkeys. Both groups then took the same number test. The first series of dots appeared on a monitor and a second series of dots would follow by. Then, a computer screen containing a collection of dots showed up. Presented with a 3rd screen containing two sets of dots, one containing the sum of the first two screens and the other a different sum. The monkeys would be rewarded with Kool-Aid if they got the right answers.

In the end, the monkeys managed to answer 76 percent of the time correctly while it is 94% for the college students. While this result does not prove that the monkeys are capable of doing complex maths like the college students, it did show that their maths abilities can be similar to those of humans in many cases.