From bees doing maths to fish driving cars: teaching animals irrelevant skills can help unlock the secrets of cognition

Yahoo

3 days ago

Scientists can get animals to do the strangest things. They've taught goldfish to drive cars, primates to perform calculations with Arabic numerals and giraffes to do statistical reasoning. But what's the point?
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, biologist Scarlett Howard from Monash University in Australia – who has taught bees to tell the difference between odd and even numbers – defends the importance of these seemingly ecologically irrelevant experiments.
She argues that they can help us understand the secrets of animal cognition, and even potentially unlock future technological developments for humanity too.
Howard got hooked on working with bees when she realised it was possible to train individual bees using sugar water as a reward. 'We work with a single bee for hours and hours at a time and she comes back and forth from the hive to the experimental area,' she says.
She began wondering what bees' cognitive boundaries were, which led to experiments exploring how bees count and tell the difference between pictures with odd and even numbers of objects.
' I wasn't doing these experiments just flippantly,' she says. 'There is a fun aspect to them, but I was also doing them because I thought they really had value to other areas of science.'
Howard argues that these kinds of experiments are important for the field of neuromorphic technology, computer systems inspired by animals. Learning about cognition from animals, and particularly how they do tasks very efficiently compared to their brain size, can help to develop 'technology based on biological systems', Howard says.
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And she says that while these human-centric tasks may seem ecologically irrelevant to an animal's species now, we may just not know yet. 'Maybe one day we'll find out that they choose flowers or remember flowers by looking at the petal number and remembering if it's an even number, that's a good flower,' she posits.
Listen to the conversation with Scarlett Howard on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the host and executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.
Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Scarlett Howard currently has funding from the Australian Research Council and the Hermon Slade Foundation.