### id260586765 Portia spiders have good number sense > This is how they discovered [*Portia* is good with numbers.](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0035) Using a species from Kenya, *Portia africana*, Cross and Jackson let *Portia* see a number of prey items from the viewing tower, and then switched up the number of prey items while the spider was en route and the target was out of sight. They found that if *Portia* had seen one prey spider from the tower but arrived to find two spiders, it was less inclined to carry out an attack. The same was true for one versus three prey items, and two versus three, and also when it encountered only one item after initially having been shown two or more. When tested with larger quantities, the spiders didn’t distinguish between three or higher, lumping them all into one category of “many.” > > Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of [1-year-old humans](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-7687.00313). - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqd3532r84f0qfnrgnb931cf) - [[Spiders are Much Smarter than You Think by Betsy Mason#id260586765 Portia spiders have good number sense|View in Vault]]