Salamanders and Math

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Salamanders, given a choice between tubes containing two fruitflies or three, lunge at the tube of three1. This hints that the ability to differentiate between small numbers of objects may have evolved much earlier than scientists had thought.

Primates can spot the greater of two quantities smaller than four, without any training. Babies choose the bowl with more cookies; monkeys go for the bucket with more slices of apple.

The surprise, says Claudia Uller, of the University of Louisiana who carried out the study, was that the amphibians "failed in the same way that babies and monkeys do" - more than three objects confuses them.

The rest of the story

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If you have a choice between two cookies or three, which would you choose? Well, if you are a 10-month-old baby, a rhesus macaque or a red-backed salamander, tests show you’ll choose three. Why?

Well just ask Dr. Claudia Uller, director of the Cognitive Development Laboratory at Louisiana. Usually Uller studies the understanding young babies have of objects, numbers and people. Recently, however, she focused her attention on salamanders when research showed babies and monkeys would go for larger amounts of objects as long as those amounts didn’t exceed three or four.

This suggested that babies and monkeys have natural numerical abilities and Uller’s research revealed that so do salamanders. “The findings indicate that salamanders ‘go for more,’ ” she said of her research, which was featured this month in the prestigious journal Nature.

Uller was also interviewed by the BBC and Discovery Channel for this research.

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