Agrillo works at the University of Padua in Italy. There, he studies how animals process information. He is finishing up several years of pitting humans against fish in trials. Those trials test their abilities to compare quantities. He can’t, of course, tell his angelfish to choose, say, the larger array of dots. He can’t tell them to do anything. So in recent tests he made his bemused students use trial and error too, just like the fish.
“At the end, they start laughing when they find they are compared with fish,” he says. Yet the fish versus human face-offs are eye-opening comparisons. And they are done as part of his search for the deep evolutionary roots of human mathematics. If fish and people eventually turn out to share some bits of their number sense (like spidey sense, except focused on quantities rather than danger), those elements might turn out to be older than 400 million years. At some point, that long ago, ancestors of angelfish and humans split apart to form different branches of the tree of life. Read Article: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/animals-can-do-almost-math
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