Perl: Want to add and then average columns of tab delimited data - arrays

Question

Data is a table that includes names in the first row and first column so I keep getting a non-numeric value error. I figured out how to ignore the first row by using if ($row[0] ne "retrovirus" ), but I don't know how to ignore the first column. I am new to programming and having a really hard time understanding arrays and how to get them to work. How do I split my data into columns of numbers excluding the words and add them together?
This is what I have so far, and its giving incorrect answers.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
# Part A. Computing the average bp length of the virus's
# genomes and each individual gene in the text file.
my $infile = "lab1_table.txt";
open INFILE, $infile or die "$infile: $!";
my #totals = ();
while (my $line = <INFILE>){
chomp $line;
my $total = 0;
my $n = 0;
# Splitting into columns
my #row = split /\t/, $line;
# Working through and adding up each column
foreach my $element (#row) {
# Ignoring first line with headings
if ($row[0] ne "retrovirus" ){
$total = $total + $element;
print "$total \n";
}
}
}
close INFILE;

Answer 1

If you totally don't care about the first element of the row, just use shift(#row)
before the foreach loop. Or if you want to preserve the original values you can get the elements from the second to the last:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
# Part A. Computing the average bp length of the virus's
# genomes and each individual gene in the text file.
my $infile = "lab1_table.txt";
open INFILE, $infile or die "$infile: $!";
while (my $line = <INFILE>)
{
chomp $line;
my $total = 0;
# Splitting into columns
my #row = split /\t/, $line;
# Working through and adding up each column
if ($row[0] ne "retrovirus" )
{
map { $total += $_ } #row[1..(scalar(#row) - 1)];
print "$total \n";
}
}
close INFILE;