Did You Know Crows Can Count?

No, I'm not making a lame joke about the band Counting Crows. As it turns out, crows can recognize symbols used as numbers.

A new study suggests that crows can recognize symbols that represent quantities of items. At Japan's Utsunomiya University, crows were shown two containers. Only the container marked with five symbols contained the food. The researchers trained the crows to identify the food container 70% of the time.

There were only eight crows involved, so it's not really conclusive, but it's still interesting.

Link Via BoingBoing

Image Via malfet [Flickr]

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Actually, I remember hearing about a study that proved baby chicks could count. They placed a number of desirable items one by one behind an obstruction and then took them away one by one. The chicks would search more often behind obstructions where less was taken away than was originally placed there.

I can't find the exact link with the methodology as I remember it, but here's one link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/01/chicks-mathematics-arithmetic-sums

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Alex the African grey parrot would have been all over that if he were still alive :( He could even associate arabic numerals with actual quantities and was shown to understand the concept of zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parrot%29

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