ChinaVirtuoso

In kindergarten, I bet your teacher used some combination of blocks, M&M's and maybe blueberry-scented stickers to drill the importance of arithmetic into your nascent brain. The goal was to pave a future in which you could add, subtract and multiply at will - ready for an adulthood filled with Excel spreadsheets and taxes, of course.
Well, scientists just put a few underwater creatures - cichlids and stingrays - through a very similar experience, and to their surprise, the fish passed with flying colors.
In a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, the research team says these animals exhibited the ability to learn basic math, and even use this knowledge to solve little logic puzzles they were given.

"We trained the animals to perform simple additions and subtractions," said Vera Schluessel, of the Institute of Zoology at the University of Bonn and lead author of the study. "In doing so, they had to increase or decrease an initial value by one."

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