Recent studies have detected simple arithmetic abilities beyond mammal and bird brains, from salamanders to bees. A new study adds stingrays and cichlids to the small but growing list of animals that can do basic addition and subtraction.
"Individuals did not just learn to pick the highest or lowest number presented based on the respective color; instead, learning was specific to adding or subtracting 'one'," Bonn University zoologist Vera Schluessel and colleaguesResearchers presented Fishes with two gates displaying cards with different numbers of shapes.
Cichlids were faster at understanding their task, and more of them were successful; the team notes this may be because these fish had participated in other cognition experiments before, whereas the stingrays had not. Both species are opportunistic feeders – not hunters – and show no requirement for counting in their mating behaviors, nor do they seem to prefer particular-sized social groups.
"A more interesting question is as to why animals such as fish… are still commonly referred to as 'primitive' or 'lower' vertebrates," the team
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