Sense of Number

As children, we arrive [blank] what he called "the conception of number" without recourse to counting words. Our non-linguistic sense of number implies that nonhuman animals can also, in principle, mentally represent the number [blank] objects in a collection - and researchers have been building a growing body of evidence of the ways in which this actually happens. All these numbers can have an evolutionary significance, and if a creature can recognize them, this could afford an adaptive advantage. Bees can count dots one [blank] a time while crawling over them; they might use this process to identify flowers by the number of petals. A sense of number could also be valuable for surviving encounters with other creatures. Small fish join the largest shoal because [blank] reduces the risk of predication. Numerical abilities are also important for navigation: honeybees count landmarks sequentially, one at a time, as a way of estimating the distance between the hive and a food source. This enables them to plot [blank] route back home.