Crows, parrots, bees and frogs, among significant others, know how to count as if their lives depend on it because it does, a finding not so surprising when you take in account just how important knowing how to count truly is to most of the fauna residing in the world.
An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty — a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Honeybees count landmarks when navigating toward sources of nectar. Lionesses tally the number of roars they hear from an intruding pride before deciding whether to attack or retreat. Some ants keep track of their steps; some spiders keep track of how many prey are caught in their web. One species of frog bases its entire mating ritual on number: If a male calls out — a whining pew followed by a brief pulsing note called a chuck — his rival responds by placing two chucks at the end of his own call. The first frog then responds with three, the other with four, and so on up to around six, when they run out of breath.
But there's a significant difference as to how man does numbers vs animals ...
But impressive as the animals’ accomplishments are, he emphasized that there are critical differences between how animals have been shown to conceptualize numerosity and how humans do it. We don’t just understand quantities; we link them to arbitrary numeric symbols. A set of five objects is not the same as the number 5, Nieder said, and the empty set is not the same as 0.
By taking this step beyond numerosity and building a symbolic system of enumeration, humans have been able to develop a more precise and discrete concept of number, manipulate quantities according to specific rules, and establish an entire science around their abstract use — what we would call mathematics.
Counting by numbers indeed.
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