[ExI] Animal Mathematics

[William Flynn Wallace]

OK, I'll accept that humans are a bit better at maths.   :)

BillK

Our music is a bit more varied too.....

Years ago it was proven that some birds could navigate by the stars.
Migrating birds were put into a room where the night sky was projected on
the ceiling.  The projection was rotated (as a variable) to insure that the
birds were going by the stars and not the magnetic field or any east/west
north/south dimension.  (apparently many animals can detect the magnetic
field)

bill w

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 10:33 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12 December 2016 at 15:54, spike  wrote:
> > Humans do not own mathematics, but we are the only species on the planet
> > using it.  That in itself is astonishing once you think about it.
> >
>
>
> Hey! You're maligning other species!  :)
>
> How about -----
>
> Bees have chosen the perfect shape for their honeycombs– the hexagon.
> Dogs do calculus to fetch / catch a ball.
> Many species do complex navigation, salmon, birds, butterflies......
> Beavers build dams
> Spiders spin webs
> Chimpanzees can count.
>
> In fact, decades of research have provided evidence for the numerical
> abilities of a number of species, including gorillas, rhesus,
> capuchin, and squirrel monkeys, lemurs, dolphins, elephants, birds,
> salamanders and fish. Recently, researchers from Oakland University in
> Michigan added black bears to the list of the numerically skilled. But
> the real maths wizards of the animal kingdom are the ants of the
> Tunisian desert (Cataglyphis fortis). They count both arithmetic and
> geometry as parts of their mathematical toolkit.
>
> When a desert ant leaves its nest in search of food, it has an
> important task: find its way back home. In almost any other part of
> the world, the ant can use one of two tricks for finding its way home,
> visual landmarks or scent trails. The windswept saltpans of Tunisia
> make it impossible to leave a scent trail, though. And the relatively
> featureless landscape doesn't provide much in the way of visual
> landmarks, other than perhaps the odd rock or weed. So evolution
> endowed the desert ant with a secret weapon: geometry. Armed with its
> mathematical know-how, the desert ant is able to “path integrate”.
> This means, according to ant navigation researchers Martin Muller and
> Rudiger Wehner, that it "is able to continuously compute its present
> location from its past trajectory and, as a consequence, to return to
> the starting point by choosing the direct route rather than retracing
> its outbound trajectory."
>
> How does this work? These desert ants calculate the distance walked by
> counting steps. Researchers discovered this by strapping stilts made
> of pig hairs onto the legs of the ants. The ant’s stilts made each
> individual step longer than it would have otherwise been, making them
> overestimate the distance home. The ants calculate the direction they
> walk by calculating the angle of their path relative to the position
> of the sun, using the same rules of trigonometry that were taught to
> me in the tenth grade. And what’s more, the ants constantly update
> their calculations to correct for the sun's march across the sky. All
> that in a nervous system comprised of as few as 250,000 neurons
> (compared to the approximately 85 billion neurons in the human).
> ----------
>
> OK, I'll accept that humans are a bit better at maths.   :)
>
> BillK
>
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