Image courtesy of blickwinkel/F.
Hecker/Alamy,
Joel Kontinen
Animals can show a variety of
skills, Now, Stingrays and zebra mbuna fish know how to add and subtract.
Research has shown that Stingrays and zebra mbuna fish can perform simple
addition and subtraction involving numbers between 1 and 5.
A little earlier,
elephants were known to have counted the number of apples in a cart and that they could also distinguish between three different human languasages, and a study in 2016 recognised that cuttlefish could count.
Now, it
this study “Vera Schluessel at the University of Bonn in Germany and her colleagues designed
tests to work out whether ocellate river stingrays (Potamotrygon
motoro) and zebra mbuna (Pseudotropheus zebra) can
add or subtract the numerical value of “one” from numbers between 1 and 5.
The team first
trained six zebra mbunas and four stingrays to make choices after seeing an
initial stimulus. The fish started in a section where they were shown an
initial picture of two shapes for 5 seconds. After this period, they could swim
through an open door into a test area where there were two more pictures of
shapes: one showing a single shape and another showing three shapes.
If the two shapes
in the initial picture were yellow, the fish were rewarded in the test area if
they swam towards the image showing just one shape – a subtraction operation.
If the two shapes in the initial image were blue, the fish were rewarded in the
test area for swimming towards the image showing three shapes – an addition
operation. “
What is interesting is that at least one plant, the Venus flytrap, also knows how to count.
For Darwinists, animal intelligence is an enormous dilemma, and plant intelligence even more so.
But in a created world we would expect animals and plants to show evidence of intelligence.
Source:
Wong, , 2022. Stingrays and zebra mbuna fish know how to add and subtract New Scientist 31 March.
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