Apples And Oranges

The elephant's memory is legendary, but in a large, gray surprise to science, the mighty Asian elephant turns out to have a distinct flair for math as well.

Under carefully controlled experimental conditions — essentially comprising a large cage and two buckets of assorted fruit — one elephant at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo managed to get its sums right 87 percent of the time.

The curiously accurate adding skills of Elephas maximus have been discovered by Naoko Irie, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tokyo putting the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis.

In her tests, three apples were dropped into one bucket and five into a second one next to it. Two more apples were added to each bucket, leaving the first with five and the second with seven apples.

Unable to see inside the buckets or probe them with her trunk, 30-year old Ashiya selected the bucket with the more apples having, apparently, counted the contents of each as it was being loaded-up with fruit.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Irie, “They could instantly compare numbers like six and five."

The elephants she subjected to the fruit-based arithmetic tests were as good at telling the difference between five and six as they were at spotting that five is greater than one, she said.