Many animals are good at math – 01/09/2024 – Marcelo Viana

We know today that number sense plays an important role in the fight for survival. The proof of this is that, to varying degrees, this sense is present in the most varied species of animals: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, and even microscopic beings.

Even very simple species can identify individual (small) numbers. In one experiment, bees were placed inside a tube with a compartment at each end: one containing sugar water, the other empty. Each compartment was marked with a different number, between 2 and 6, of geometric shapes. The bees quickly learned to identify the number of shapes in the compartment with sweetened water, up to a maximum of 4: with 5 or 6 shapes they were already confused.

Even more surprising, many animal species can perform arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction, and even arrive at the concept of “zero”.

Wild monkeys watched scientists place pieces of bread in a closed box and then, at different times, remove some of the pieces from the box. The monkeys couldn’t see how many pieces were still left inside. Just like that, they continued approaching the box until the last piece of bread was removed and it was empty. The only explanation seems to be that they subtracted the withdrawals from the initial amount, until the account reached zero! Similar experiments have been carried out with crows, and even with chicken chicks, with similar results.

Chimpanzees are particularly gifted with numbers. We know that they can be taught to identify groups of objects with the respective numeral written as Arabic numerals — three circles with the numeral 3, five squares with the numeral 5, etc. — and even to put these numerals in order.

At Kyoto University in Japan, the numbers 1 to 9 were displayed on the screen for 210 milliseconds (the duration of an average blink), and then hidden by white squares. All of the young chimpanzees participating in the experiment were able to tap these squares sequentially, in ascending order of digits!

Now, there’s no point trying to do this at home: humans can’t do it! It seems that in the six million years since the Homo sapiens separated from the chimpanzee, our brains evolved in different ways: we lost the incredible numerical memory of our closest cousins, but perhaps that was the price for discovering Pythagoras’ theorem!

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