How elephants work to keep their families together
Jeanne:
December 5th, 2007
Elephants appear to be better at keeping tabs on family members than some humans, it seems. In a recent study, scientists found that elephants were able to use their absent relatives’ scent to keep track of their location despite the fact that these relatives were not present in the group at the time. The research was carried out by examining the behaviour of wild elephants in Kenya and provides further evidence to suggest that certain members of the animal kingdom may be more developed than previously believed.
Wild elephants often move in herds. However, they frequently leave the companionship of their pack and break off into smaller groups to compete with other elephants for good and grazing land. Elephants were shown samples of pack members’ urine and, in general, reacted with surprise when presented with the scent of a family member that they believed not to be in the area. Dr. Lucy Bates, one of the researchers involved in this study, elaborated on the phenomenon when speaking to the media:
“We reckoned that only if each elephant was continually updating its memory of where everyone was, and was able to identify specific individuals from their urine, would they show any different reaction to such cases.”
The elephants’ need to keep track of their fellow pack members has interesting parallels with human behaviour. Anybody with young children, for example, will know how difficult it can be to keep track of youngsters in a crowded area. As Dr. Richard Byrne of St. Andrews University comments:
“You think of a comparable human situation - perhaps a mum in the supermarket with three kids and a husband who’d rather be looking in the DIY section - keeping track of four or five people is really quite a strain. But our elephants are doing it in parties of 20 to 30 family members. It may be that where elephants really excel in memory is not remembering things for very long periods but in everyday working memory - where it is important to update and delete things rather than remember things forever.”
If only human parents could adopt a similar technique!