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I haven't read the paper, but I assume the novelty here is the discovery of what happens when more than two of the hairs are triggered. The BBC Life series with David Attenborough talked about the counting/triggering mechanism years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7eQKSf0LmY

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Ya I immediately thought of the same Life segment. Is there something new in this discovery that I'm not seeing? Maybe the fact that they can also tell how big the prey is and add digestive enzymes accordingly?

Yes, that process you refer to apparently kicks in after 5 triggers which, I think, is a much more impressive feat of genuine counting.

I'm now intrigued by its memory capacity and how that works.

A simple threshold seems easy to me. You just fire some messenger and if the concentration is high enough (N counts of messenger emitting) it reacts.

Something binds or disassembles the messenger so the system resets after some time.

The details would still be interesting of course.

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