Fibonacci Nature Detectives

We love a good mystery at our house, especially since we recently hosted an Encyclopedia Brown birthday party for my 9 year old. Even the adults had fun! Now that the weather is warmer, I wanted to move the clue finding outdoors so we decided to research mysteries found in nature and ran across the Fibonacci sequence. This set of numbers was discovered by the medieval mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. He determined that there is an infinite sequence of numbers, often found in nature, starting with 0, 1, 1, and goes on by adding the sum of the two previous numbers to create 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on.

I have to admit, even I was a bit skeptical that we would find these numbers in our backyard but detectives (and scientists) are supposed to be skeptical, right? So we put our detective hats on to search for common numbers in nature.

Much to our surprise, we DID find similar patterns in numerous flowers with five petals and plants with three leaves. Check out those three leaves on our strawberry plant! We then started to wonder if there were common numbers seen in plants, then are there common numbers found in bugs?

So we captured a few creepy crawlies to check them for Fibonacci. Did a lady bug have a Fibonacci number of dots? Nope… Did a stink bug have a Fibonacci pattern? No! What about the cute little caterpillar that followed us inside? Was he a length of a Fibonacci number? No again! I was about to call fowl when we dug a little further and found the Fibonacci spiral.

So we grabbed some graph paper and set out plotting the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and connected it with circular arcs.

We thought it looked a lot like a snail shell and set out to find a snail in our backyard to check it for a Fibonacci spiral pattern. And look at what we found…

Mystery solved! There ARE patterns found in nature! We had so much fun finding Fibonacci numbers in nature that I am certain we won’t look at flowers, leaves, or snails in our backyard the same way again! We hope you enjoy having your own Fibonacci Nature Scavenger Hunt!

This post is featured on the 4 weeks of fun series called DIY Summer Camp Activities hosted by Teaching without Chairs. Click HERE for more DIY Bugs & Insect (and micro invertebrates) Summer Camp Activities and click HERE for more older kids DIY Summer Camp Activities! There are also activities for preschoolers found HERE.