Researchers have shown that the animals can add small numbers of apples to get their trunks on a bigger food prize Elephants are famous for their supposedly superb memory. Now it seems that they are good at simple maths too. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have found an Asian elephant named Ashya can add small quantities together and correctly identify which is larger. For example, when researcher Naoko Irie-Sugimoto dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples into the first and five into the second, Ashya correctly identified that the first bucket contained more apples and began munching on her tasty prize. Ashya and her companions chose the correct bucket 74% of the time. ‘I even get confused when I’m dropping the bait,’ Irie told New Scientist magazine. The elephants’ counting abilities are far from unique. Chimps, salamanders and pigeons have shown numerical abilities in lab tests, but what is more impressive for the elephants is that their ability to distinguish between two figures does not get worse when those numbers are more similar. The elephants that Irie-Sugimoto tested were as good at telling the […]