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This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。

Rats can do it. Mice can do it; honeybees; some people, too. And now add green crabs¹ to the list of creatures that can navigate³ a maze⁴.

大老鼠能做到。小老鼠能做到。蜜蜂以及有些人也能做到。现在，能走出迷宫的生物名单中又加上了青蟹。

"They're far more sophisticated animals than we give them credit for." Ed Pope, a marine⁵ biologist at Swansea University in the U.K.

“它们远比我们想象的要复杂。”英国斯旺西大学的海洋生物学家艾德·波普说到。

Apart from a couple preliminary papers from the early 1900s, he says—including one by the influential⁶ psychologist and primatologist Robert Yerkes—there wasn't a lot of evidence whether crabs possessed⁷ this ability.

他表示，除了20世纪初的几篇早期论文外，包括有影响力的心理学家和灵长类动物学家罗伯特·亚尔克斯的一篇论文在内，没有太多证据表明螃蟹是否具有这种能力。

So Pope and his colleagues went to the shore and brought back a dozen green crabs. They built mazes⁸ in the lab and put a crushed mussel at the end as enticement⁹. 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.

因此，波普及其同事去海边带回了12只青蟹。他们在实验室里建了迷宫，并在迷宫出口放了贻贝碎肉作为诱饵。之后，他们将螃蟹放入迷宫，并拍下它们移动的视频。在之后的一个月，这些螃蟹为了找到食物而跑过或蹿过迷宫的速度越来越快。

"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 they were learning the maze."

“但它们转错弯的次数也开始越来越少。到第三周时，它们已经完全不会再转错弯。这很好地证明了螃蟹正在研究迷宫。”

Then the researchers thoroughly¹⁰ scrubbed the tank to get rid of any telltale mussel aromas¹¹. After a few weeks, they put the crabs back into the maze. And even with no mussel waiting at the end of the course, experienced crabs still made it to the end more quickly than crabs who'd never walked the maze. That ability suggests that the veterans had indeed remembered the route. The details are in the journal Biology Letters.

之后，研究人员彻底清洗了容器，以去除任何能引导方向的贻贝气味。几周之后，他们将螃蟹放回迷宫。即使迷宫出口处没有贻贝，有经验的螃蟹仍比从未走过迷宫的螃蟹更快到达终点。这种能力表明经验丰富的螃蟹确实记得路线。研究详情发表在《生物学通讯》期刊上。

Maze-running crabs are not just a novelty act. The trials demonstrate that wild crabs might be highly competent at returning to a favorite feeding spot or hiding place. And as the world's oceans become more polluted and acidic, the crab² finding gives Pope and other scientists a cognitive¹² skill to test—to see how crabs and other undersea invertebrates¹³ might weather a changing tide.

跑迷宫的螃蟹并不仅仅是新奇的个例。这些实验表明，野生螃蟹可能非常善于回到最爱的进食地点或藏身之处。随着全球海洋污染越来越严重，酸性越来越强，这项有关螃蟹的发现使波普和其他科学家获得了可进行测试的认知能力，以观察螃蟹和其它海底无脊椎动物如何应对变化的潮汐。

Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。