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Science Quickly

Crabs Do a Maze

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2019

⏱️ 2 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Green crabs learned to navigate a maze without making a single wrong turn—and remembered the skill weeks later. Christopher Intagliata reports.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visitacolkot.co.j.p.

0:23.9

That's y-A-K-U-L-T dot-C-O-J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science.

0:37.2

I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.1

Rats can do it, mice can do it, honeybees, some people too,

0:43.3

and now add green crabs to the list of creatures that can navigate a maze.

0:47.9

The far more sophisticated animals can give them credit for.

0:50.3

Ed Pope, a marine biologist at Swansea University in the UK.

0:54.5

Apart from a couple preliminary papers from the early 1900s, he says, including one by the

0:59.2

influential psychologist and primatologist Robert Yerkes, there wasn't a lot of evidence

1:03.7

whether crabs possess this ability. So Pope and his colleagues went to the shore and brought

1:08.2

back a dozen green crabs. They built mazes in the lab and put

1:11.8

a crushed muscle at the end as enticement. And then they set the crabs loose and captured video of their

1:17.2

movements. Over the next month, the crabs ran, or maybe skittered through the maze faster and

1:22.6

faster to get to the food. But they also started taking few and fewer wrong turns. In fact, by week three,

1:28.4

we had animals that were taking no wrong turns at all. And that, I think, gave us quite good evidence

1:32.9

that they were learning the maze. Then the researchers thoroughly scrubbed the tank to get rid of any

1:37.3

telltale muscle aromas. After a few weeks, they put the crabs back into the maze, and even with

...

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