This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher in Tagayata.

Rats can do it, mice can do it, honey bees, some people too, and now add green crabs to the list of creatures that can navigate a

maze. The farm was sophisticated animals going to give them credit for... Ed Pope, a

marine biologist at Swansea University in the UK. Apart from a couple preliminary papers from the early 1900s, he says,

including one by the influential psychologist and primatologist Robert Yerkeys,

there wasn't a lot of evidence whether crabs possessed this ability.

So Pope and his colleagues went to the shore and brought back a dozen green crabs.

They built mazes in the lab and put a crushed muscle at the end as enticement.

And then they set the crabs loose and captured

video of their movements. Over the next month the crabs ran or maybe skittered

through the maze faster and faster to get to the food. But they also started taking fewer and fewer wrong turns.

In fact, by week three, we had animals that were taking no wrong turns at all.

And that I think gave us quite good evidence that they were learning the maze.

Then the researchers thoroughly scrubbed the tank to get rid of any telltale muscle aromas.

After a few weeks they put the crabs back into the maze and even with no muscle waiting at the

end of the course,

experienced crabs still made it to the end

more quickly than crabs who never walked a maze.

That ability suggests that the veterans

had indeed remembered the route.

The details are in the journal biology letters.

Maze running crabs are not just a novelty act. The trials demonstrate that wild crabs

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