Math Adds Up For Elephants
Posted on: Thursday, 21 August 2008, 13:30 CDT
An Asian elephant has reportedly mastered simple arithmetic, adding to the growing number of animals that are able to count.
The elephant, named Ashya, has shown mastery in simple addition problems.
When Ashya’s trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognized that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples.
"I even get confused when I'm dropping the bait," says Naoko Irie, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan and Ashya’s math tutor.
Irie presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology's annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.
She discovered that as well as summing small numbers with almost 90% accuracy; elephants can also discriminate between small numbers.
Experts say animals from salamanders to pigeons to chimpanzees can discern numerical values. But all animals, including humans when forced to make split-second decisions, are best at telling apart two quantities when the ratio between the large and small number is greatest.
But Irie says that isn’t so for elephants.
The four that she tested distinguished between five and six apples as well as they did between five and one. They picked the bucket with the most fruit 74% of the time, on average, far above 50-50.
Mya Thompson, an ecologist at Cornell University who studies elephants and attended Irie's talk, said it really is tough to figure out why elephants would need to count.
Asian elephants live in close-knit groups of six to eight, and they may count one another to make sure the herd sticks to together.
Irie says an alternative view might be that the mathematical prowess of elephants could be a side effect of their bulging brains and an evolutionary kinship to other "smart" animal.
The Asian Elephant is one of the two living species of elephant and are the largest living land animal in Asia.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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