Counting elephants

A researcher in Japan has discovered that elephants can count. Naoko Irie, who is working on her PhD thesis, worked with elephants in Japanese zoos to test their mathematical ability.

Irie dropped a differing number of apples into two buckets, placed side by side, then allowed the watching elephant to choose which bucket it wanted. Although it was not allowed to look into the bucket itself, or feel inside with its trunk, an elephant in Tokyo's Ueno Zoo correctly picked the bucket containing the largest number of apples, 87% of the time. Another elephant in the south of the country scored 68% - still an impressive 18% more than it could have achieved by chance alone.

The elephants also demonstrated that they could keep tally of the number of apples dropped in each bucket, even if they were not all put in at once, and could even differentiate when the difference was as small as one apple.