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Asian elephants may have just earned the new title of ‘Maths Kings of the Jungle’, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan have found that Asian elephants have similar maths skills to humans.

While previous studies have shown that animals have some for of numerical competence, this is mainly based on inaccurate quantity, rather than absolute numbers.

To prove that this isn’t the case in Asian elephants, the researchers trained a 14-year-old Asian elephant called Authai from the Ueno Zoo in Japan to use a computer-controlled touch panel.

(Image: Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan)

Authai was presented with a judgment task on the screen, and then had to indicate with her trunk which one of the two figures shown to her at a time contained more items.

These ranged from 0 to 10 items, and contained pictures of bananas, watermelons and apples.

Importantly, the fruit were not all presented in the same size, to ensure that Authai did not make her choices based on the total area that was covered with illustrations per card.

The results revealed that Authai scored 181/271 - a success rate of 66.8%.

Naoko Irie, who led the study, said: “We found that her performance was unaffected by distance, magnitude, or the ratios of the presented numerosities, but consistent with observations of human counting, she required a longer time to respond to comparisons with smaller distances.

“This study provides the first experimental evidence that nonhuman animals have cognitive characteristics partially identical to human counting.”