In what must surely now be described as a classic maths news item, yet another species of animal has joined the ranks of things which can determine rank. This time it’s the humble fruit fly’s turn to tap its hoof the correct number of times, as these articles in The Metro and Nature (the two standard science references for their respective ends of the credibility spectrum) describe. Props to The Metro for an excellent headline pun.
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Alex the parrot could count to eight
The Nature News Blog reports on a new addition to the non-human numerism literature:
Even in death, the world’s most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot (Psittacus eithacus) trained to count objects – have just been published.
They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight and three sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates. The work was just published in the journal Animal Cognition.