ArticleFrontiers in psychology2012
Quantity Estimation Based on Numerical Cues in the Mealworm Beetle (Tenebrio molitor).
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Social Relevance of Numbers: Insights from Animal Studies.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Group size affects spontaneous quantity discrimination performance in wild Western Australian magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen dorsalis).Animal cognition · 2025Article
- The visual stimuli attributes instrumental for collective-motion-related decision-making in locusts.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Goal-directed behavior in Tenebrio molitor larvae.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Numerical discrimination in Drosophila melanogaster.Cell reports · 2023Article
- No evidence that relatedness or familiarity modulates male harm inEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Bumblebees Use Sequential Scanning of Countable Items in Visual Patterns to Solve Numerosity Tasks.Integrative and comparative biology · 2020Article
- Male responses to sperm competition when rivals vary in number and familiarity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Evolution of cognitive and neural solutions enabling numerosity judgements: lessons from primates and corvids.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Number sense and state-dependent valuation in cuttlefish.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Use of ordinal information by fish.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- In a green frame of mind: perspectives on the behavioural ecology and cognitive nature of plants.AoB PLANTS · 2014Article
- Female meadow voles, Microtus pennsylvanicus, respond differently to the scent marks of multiple male conspecifics.Animal cognition · 2014Article
- Quantity judgments in the context of risk/reward decision making in striped field mice: first "count," then hunt.Frontiers in psychology · 2013Article
- Number without language: comparative psychology and the evolution of numerical cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2013Article
- Numerical cognition in bees and other insects.Frontiers in psychology · 2013Article
- Short-term increases in rival number improves single mating productivity in maleBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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3 authors.
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Abstract
In this study, we used a biologically relevant experimental procedure to ask whether mealworm beetles (Tenebrio molitor) are spontaneously capable of assessing quantities based on numerical cues. Like other insect species, mealworm beetles adjust their reproductive behavior (i.e., investment in mate guarding) according to the perceived risk of sperm competition (i.e., probability that a female will mate with another male). To test whether males have the ability to estimate numerosity based on numerical cues, we staged matings between virgin females and virgin males in which we varied the number of rival males the experimental male had access to immediately preceding mating as a cue to sperm competition risk (from 1 to 4). Rival males were presented sequentially, and we controlled for continuous cues by ensuring that males in all treatments were exposed to the same amount of male-male contact. Males exhibited a marked increase in the time they devoted to mate guarding in response to an increase in the number of different rival males they were exposed to. Since males could not rely on continuous cues we conclude that they kept a running tally of the number of individuals they encountered serially, which meets the requirements of the basic ordinality and cardinality principles of proto-counting. Our results thus offer good evidence of "true" numerosity estimation or quantity estimation and, along with recent studies in honey-bees, suggest that vertebrates and invertebrates share similar core systems of non-verbal numerical representation.
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