Elephants are considered some of the smartest animals on the planet. We have seen that they are able to learn socially, showcase emotions, and even teach their offspring thanks to their complex brains. The human brain serves as a benchmark of intelligence and weighs around 3 lbs. Elephants have one of the largest brains that weighs in at 11 lbs putting them in 2nd place only to sperm whales.
Image of Human, Pilot Whale, and Elephant brain size comparison.
The hippocampus is a brain area associated with emotion. Elephants possess a much larger hippocampus by proportion that is linked to their closeness between herd members. Their caring capacity has been noted in many observational and control settings. Elephants are only separated by death and capture and have distinct rituals when mourning the loss of a family member. Elephants are one of the only species that buries their dead by digging a hole and moving the body into the pit. Researchers have noticed in some instances when a matriarch mother dies young calves make sounds that mimic crying.
Elephants large capacity for intellect and emotion leads to a philosophical debate on whether it is ok to hunt them. With many conservation efforts and protection agencies, elephant poaching has been decreasing over the past years but it is still up to us to ensure the survival of such an important species.
Elephants are a non-predatory species. They acquire their nutrition from eating vegetation (up to 375 pounds a day). However, being the largest land animal they are often under predatory attack. Carnivores (meat-eaters) such as lions, hyenas, and crocodiles prey upon young, sick, orphaned, or injured elephants.
However, humans are the greatest predatory threat to elephants due to poaching for ivory.
Elephants can defend against predators by using their immense body mass, large strong tusks, and overall brute force. When threatened they often "charge" their attacker usually ramming and stomping upon contact. Research shows the oldest matriarchs and those with most experience often take the role in leading the protection against predators attacking the younger smaller elephants.
Common responses to a threat include an alert posture with the head raised, ears spread, tail raised, and trunk raised or turned to catch scent. Older bulls and matriarchs form a defense ring around the calves. Elephants will often perform a display of aggression in attempts to intimidate or scare of predators to avoid fighting. However if the predator does not back down, the elephant will proceed to perform a defensive attack.
As we’ve hopefully convinced you of by now,
elephants are fascinating and majestic animals. They have many interesting
characteristics, are intelligent and endearing, and can even be considered
personable. They are massive in size, but also seemingly gentle in nature.
Because of this, elephants are very prominent in pop culture, politics, and
even religion. Here are only a few of the places elephants are found:
in Hinduism:
The Hindu god, Ganesha, has the head of an elephant and the body of a boy.
Elephants in the Lord of the Rings.
The elephant, Horton, plays the main role in a couple of Dr. Seuss books.
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Who can forget the lovable, Dumbo??
Tantor is featured in Tarzan .
Hathi in the Jungle Book
The Republican Party symbol
And last but not least...
Water for Elephants, which features an intelligent and endearing elephant, Rosie.
Obviously, elephants are extremely prevalent in the world of pop-culture, politics and religion. Although there are sure to be many more examples, we thought these few would just help to exemplify their many roles in culture.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has created a listing protocol to establish an inventory of biological species. The ranking system incorporates colors and abbreviations to make the listing comprehensive and easily understandable. Starting with LC (least conerning) and moving to EX (extinct) the labeling provides an easy system for most people to understand where a given species lies.
The redlist established by IUCN is a range of vulnerable, risk of extinction, and extreme risk of extinction. The two main species of elephant find themselves within the threatened portion of this bracket. The African elephant is marked at VU (vulnerable) while the Asian elephant is marked EN (endangered). The African elephant population was recorded to be around 10 million in 1900 and has dropped to about 600,000 in 1990. Likewise the Asian elephant population has been reduced to around 30,000-40,000 living members.
There are several main contributing factors that have led to the dramatic reduction of the elephant population worldwide. Many Eastern countries place high value on ivory obtained from elephant tusks which has created a high demand that can only be satisfied by poaching elephants and removing their tusks once dead. Human population growth has led to deforestation and habitat reduction across much of the elephants original territory. Their migration paths have been blocked and fenced off leaving them with inadequate access to resources such as water and food. Unfortunately this restriction of land forces elephants into agricultural areas where they often fall victim to death by gunshots when farmers wish to protect their crops. They are also hunted by Africans that have unstable food supplies and rely on them to prevent starvation.
There are many conservation agencies that are busy at work to rebuild the elephant population and prevent further destruction of habitat. The US has granted several million dollars toward elephant conservation in hopes of warding off extinction. The elephant population as a whole has seen an increase in number over the past decade thanks to these efforts and with growing support it is projected that they will slowly move down the IUCN red list in the future.
Empirical Study - "Elephants know when they need a helping trunk in a cooperative task"
A recent study from Frans B. M. de Waal et al. (2011)
demonstrated the cognitive understanding to effectively to be aware and perform
cooperative tasks in elephants. The researchers paired 12 elephants into 6
unique pairs to participate in a task that required coordinated pulling. This
task was previously used to study cooperation in chimpanzees, requiring the
involvement of two chimpanzees to lift a heavy weight by rope instead of only
one chimpanzee. A single rope was threaded around the weight apparatus such
that pulling on one end would only move the rope, not the weight, making the
other end of the rope unavailable to the other partner. There were two
conditions for this study: simultaneous release – where both elephants were
released together from 10 meters back from the rope ends; and a delayed release
– where one elephant would be released before the other, requiring a learning
condition for the first elephant to wait for the second in order to perform the
task correctly. This learning was taught by shaping procedures using
consecutively longer intervals. All six elephants were highly successful in
waiting for their partners across the 60 trials, and only increased in the
longer delays after the first day, suggesting quickly learned contingency of
the task regardless of the length of waiting time. The elephants inhibited their
pulling response for delays up to 45 seconds, and learned that cooperation, the
requirement of simultaneous pulling of the rope from both ends, was necessary
to obtain the reward. These results provide ample demonstration of
understanding cooperation. The researchers believe that through convergent
evolutions, elephants may have reached a cooperative skill level equivalent to
chimpanzees
As aforementioned in this blog, elephants are social animals. It is very common for females to live with each other, and with their offspring for the entirety of their lives. Furthermore, many female elephants (AKA cows) live with their daughters, and then their offspring. On the other hand, male elephants (AKA bulls) tend to branch off around the age of 12. They tend to live alone, or with a smaller number of other bulls.
When it comes to mating, there is a very small amount of time (a few days) that the female elephants can become impregnated. This occurs around four times a year once the female is at sexual maturity, at around 12 years of age. Her readiness is signaled to the male elephants by an odor that she exudes, along with vocal calls. Male elephants also reach peak testosterone levels multiple times a year (known as being in musth). This is signaled to females by their urine, and also their vocal calls. Female elephants will almost always pick a male who is in musth over one that isn’t.
Elephant mating is a mutual process. Once the two elephants determine that they are both physically ready to mate, the bull will begin to “flirt” with the cow. She will usually pay no attention to him for a few minutes. If she is not interested, she can get away seeing as cows are quicker than bulls. If she is interested, she will begin to reciprocate the flirting. This flirting is done mostly with the trunks. The elephants will intertwine their trunks, and may put their trunks in each others mouths. To mate, the elephants leave the herd to be alone. After mating (which only takes a few minutes), the elephants may stay together for up to two weeks and continue to display affectionate behaviors towards one another. It is not uncommon for same-sex bonding and sexual encounters to occur in elephants.
This is a picture I took in South Africa of elephants showing standard mating behaviors with their trunks.
After a female is impregnated, her gestation period is around 22 months. As previously mentioned, elephants begin breeding around 12 years of age, which is when they become sexually mature. Female elephants reproduce every 4-9 years, and rarely have twins. When an elephant is ready to give birth, the other females in the herd will circle around her. The birthing process takes around 2 hours. After the birth of the newborns, the mother closely and tenderly cares for her offspring. The newborns remain in constant contact with their mothers for the first year of their lives, and continue to remain very near to them for the next eight years! When the young elephants reach sexual maturity, the males will go off on their own, whereas the females may remain near their mothers for 50 years.
One of the most challenging problems that elephants have had to face is hunting and poaching for their highly coveted ivory tusks. Elephant ivory has been exported from Asia and Africa since the 14th century B.C. Their ivory tusks would be used for displays of wealth, and in the modern era, as piano keys and billiard balls. Northern Africa was wiped clean of elephants due to ivory hunters nearly 1,000 years ago. It is believed that at the peak of the Ivory Trade, nearly 800 to 1,000 tons of elephant ivory was exported to Europe alone. The World Wars caused a major decrease in the ivory trade, but there was a resurgence in the early 1970's. Japan consumed nearly 40% of the global trade, while Europe and North America consumed another 40%.
The African Elephant population was estimated to be 1.3 million in 1979, but due to ivory poaching and only 10 years later, the population was reduced to nearly 600,000. Roughly 75,000 elephants would be killed annually for the ivory trade generating nearly 1 billion dollars. Fortunately, organizations such as CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) established a limit to how many elephants could be killed for the ivory trade, greatly reducing the risk of endangerment. In 1990, CITES declared the international ivory trade to be banned. Eventually by the late 1990's, ivory trade was again allowed but limited and immensely controlled.
Like the African Elephant, the Asian Elephant was put on Appendix One of the CITES in 1975. By the late 1980's it was believed that there was only 50,000 Asian Elephants remaining. Although it is banned, the Asian elephant species is still in danger from the ivory trade.
Currently there is a major problem with poaching from China and Japan. In 2008, these countries made a purchase of 108 tons from certain regions of Africa. There is a lack of control over the ivory trade in China, and it was reported that at one time a Chinese document leaked reporting over 121 tons (tusks from roughly 11,000 elephants) could not be accounted for.
Some African countries oppose the bans on international ivory trade, and poach still does exist. It is a major problem that the remaining species of Elephant have to face. Life alone in the African and Asian wild are challenging enough with the scarcity of water and food, but if poaching elephants for ivory persists, the species will be in great endangerment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory_trade
http://www1.american.edu/ted/elephant.htm
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Elephants: A Social Creature
Copyright: ElephantVoices
As we have learned, elephants roam in large herds and cover vast amounts of land. It is of no surprise then that they come across a wide variety of environmental obstacles. Whether it be an electrical fence put up by farmers or a specific type of vegetation these features offer a unique opportunity to study how elephants learn. Learning is described as an enduring change in the mechanism of behavior,
involving specific stimuli or responses, resulting from experience with those
or similar stimuli or responses. There are various categories one can choose to look at while studying the capacity to learn in a given species but we will focus on social learning. Elephants are social creatures. When born, the calf is immediately dependent on its mother for survival. They suckle at the mother for milk up to a couple months of age until they are ready to start foraging for food. Young calfs have a tendency to pick up anything that might resemble food and put it into their mouth. Luckily during their suckling phase they were exposed to their peers who serve as a model to show them what is edible and what to avoid. While elephants might venture out and eat on their own at an early age compared to some species, they are relatively slow to mature. The calves are dependent on their mothers until sexual maturity which isn't reached until pre-teen years. Sometimes they aren't weened until age 17 or later, when they finally accept their role as a leader of the heard. This close contact with their mothers provides them with instruction on the process of raising young. This instruction is aided by the chance to watch the mothers raise a younger sibling while the young elephants remain under their supervision. Observational studies have shown that there is a higher success rate for calves born to more experienced, older mothers than those born to younger females. In some cases researchers have seen experienced mothers aid a young mother who is struggling to take care of her calf in order to perserve the life of her calf. An interesting finding indicated that across the same species of elephants, different behavior patterns were observed. Elephants in areas that are subject to hunters show defensive attacks on livestock. This behavior is not present in elephants that occupy areas without a hunter presence. Additionally, elephants that have been introduced to wild herds after being bred in captivity exhibit violent behaviors uncharacteristic of the group until they have time to learn what is "socially acceptable." The ability for elephants to learn from their parents and peer groups provides them with a necessary opportunity that contributes to survival. Without proper teaching and example, elephants have been known to exhibit maladaptive behaviors such a violence and aggression.
Due to the fact
that elephants are such amazingly large animals, they require a great deal of
food to sustain themselves. Elephants can typically eat 330-375 pounds of
vegetation a day. When you think about this in comparison to the amount of food
humans typically eat a day (around 4.5-5 pounds), it’s absolutely
mind-boggling! It comes as no surprise that elephant must spend the greater
portion of their day (around 80%, or 16-18 hours) feeding themselves.
Elephants
are herbivores, meaning that they only eat plant life. They eat everything from
leaves, grasses, fruits, small bushes, and many other types of foliage. One of
their favorite things to eat is bark, because it is a good source or calcium
and aids their bodies in digestion. In addition to the immense amount of food
that elephants consume daily, they also need to drink anywhere from 18-26
gallons of water daily. Male elephants have the capacity to drink 55 gallons of
water in less than 5 minutes! Again, comparing this amount to how much water
humans should drink daily (less than a gallon) definitely puts this amount in
perspective. Interestingly, elephants have also been known to tear up soil with
their tusks, which they then place in their mouth. This is to obtain minerals
and salts that they aren’t obtaining from their herbivore lifestyle.
As
previously discussed in this blog, elephants use their trunks for a wide array
of purposes. Feeding is one of the trunks most important functions. The
elephant can slough bark of trees using its’ tusk, and then use its trunk to
pick the bark or other foliage up and place it in its mouth. Furthermore,
elephants use their trunks to suck up water, which they then spray in their
mouths. This is part of the reason that elephants have such a great capacity
for drinking immense amounts of water so quickly.
Elephants are NOT territorial. They are nomadic animals that travel in matriarchal, or female-led, societies. Male elephants are usually solitary but in nature they may associate with other adult males, or better known as, bulls, in small groups that constantly gain and lose members. Elephants usually have a home range from 10 to 70 square kilometers, and possibly larger depending on the size of the herd and the season.
The elephant's physiology is designed to support a nomadic life style with an average daily distance covered being 17km. They often have the stereotypical behavior of rocking back and for as a response to lack of movement. It is thought that Elephants are nomadic due to their destructive feeding behavior. They literally push down the environment surrounding them due to their large mass. Elephants knock down trees, daily, to strip bark or reach high leaves. They also kill large areas of grass when grazing.
In some instances, elephants will use their tusks to mark trees to establish territory of their home range.
Male elephants (bulls) associate in small groups that have a hierarchal-ranking structure that is constantly in flux. This meaning leaders constantly change depending on the size, age, and strength, when members leave and enter. They do not seek leadership roles, but rather adapt to the members in the group. However, bulls determine their dominance by sparring which is usually determined by size and strength. Their nomadic social system allows for maximum reproductive possibilities. With this life style, bulls can potentially find up to 30 mates in a year.
Female elephants associate in concentric rings, with the innermost ring comprising of related adult females. This family units can have group sizes from 3 to 25 members. The most dominant female, usually the oldest, is called the matriarch, and usually determines the ranging pattern for the family. In ideal circumstances, families congregate with other families for more protection.
Here is a video of some elephants in Tanzania migrating and acting in their non-territorial but nomadic behavior
Fifty to sixty million years ago, ancestors of today's elephants lived in a wide variety of environmental settings that ranged in climate and temperature. During this time, mammals the size of a pig showed preliminary features that would eventually lead to what we see as the defining attributes of elephants. The closest living relatives to elephants today are manatees, dugongs, and hyraxes which all live in very different niches.
It is estimated that over time there have been close to 350 species of proboscideans but due to natural selection and environmental shifts they have long gone extinct. Proboscidae are thought to be relatively adaptable considering the wide variety of environments they have been found to occupy. Their make-up allows for them to be successful in living in different climates but due to their large size, they lack quick adaptions that allow for survival in times of rapid climate change.
ELEPHANTS TODAY
The Asian elephant is more closely related to the mammoth and actually originated in Africa. As it spread to parts of Asia where it is found today many subspecies branched off that still live in various countries. Males are mostly tuskless which is a result of selection pressures caused by humans hunting elephants for ivory.
The African elephant is regarded as the "newest" elephant on the scene. They are larger than the Asian elephant and have notably larger ears. An elephants ears serve as a cooling mechanism. By circulating blood through the ear's membrane body temperature is reduced. African elephants require larger ears since they live in a warmer climate.
Elephants are able to hear sound waves below our own hearing level which allows them to communicate over long distances on the open plains. This evolutionary adaptation acts as a survival mechanism that protects elephants by allowing them to communicate under the radar of other animals and predators.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Elephants are amazing animals. They are the largest on-land animal, and can weigh up to 24,000 pounds! Typically, elephants can live to be fifty to seventy years old, but the oldest documented elephant lived to be eighty-four. Not only are they fascinating physically and in their abilities, but they also play a large role in many cultures and even religions. There are a few characteristics that are commonly associated with elephants, namely their trunks and tusks. Elephants use their trunks for a variety of purposes, ranging from wiping their eyes to alerting other elephants of danger to smelling, aiding in hearing, and sensing vibrations. Elephant tusks, similarly, have a variety of purposes. Elephants use them for getting to food, clearing a path, and as a form of intimidation. Because the tusks are ivory, a much sought after material, elephants are frequently hunted for their tusks.The rest of this blog will continue to explore the many fascinating aspects of elephants. Please enjoy. :-)
