Newborn baby chicks are doing subtraction before most of us have had our morning coffee.

This kind of mental math is rare in the animal kingdom. While some primates, parrots, and dogs can recognize quantity differences, they usually need training. Chicks? They’re born with it. No tutoring required.

Just days after hatching, baby chicks can track simple addition and subtraction. In studies, they consistently chose the group with more objects—even when the changes happened out of sight.