Anim Cogn (2007) 10:63–70 DOI 10.1007/s10071-006-0036-5

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Quantity discrimination in female mosquitofish Christian Agrillo · Marco Dadda · Angelo Bisazza

Received: 11 October 2005 / Revised: 1 June 2006 / Accepted: 2 July 2006 / Published online: 26 July 2006 C Springer-Verlag 2006


Abstract The ability in animals to count and represent different numbers of objects has received a great deal of attention in the past few decades. Cumulative evidence from comparative studies on number discriminations report obvious analogies among human babies, non-human primates and birds and are consistent with the hypothesis of two distinct and widespread mechanisms, one for counting small numbers (