African elephants gossip about people: Researcher observed elephants for 50 years and compiled an encyclopedia of sounds and behavior

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1975, 19-year-old Joyce Poole had an incredible chance: she was offered to study elephants in Kenya. The young researcher did not miss such a unique opportunity. As a result, these giant intelligent animals became part of her life. For 46 years of communication with elephants, Joyce even began to understand their language! The result is a huge video and audio encyclopedia of their behavior and sounds.

It all started when the researcher Cynthia Moss, who at that time was at the very beginning of the path to study female African elephants, invited a college student Joyce Poole to follow her example, but to study not females, but males. At the same time, Moss joked that the males, they say, are too boring for her. Poole quickly proved otherwise. As it turns out, their behavior is incredibly interesting.

Poole is now a National Geographic researcher and one of the world's experts on the behavior of African elephants. Together with her husband, she founded the non-profit organization ElephantVoices, which aims to educate people about how elephants communicate and how important it is to preserve them on our planet.

Thousands of behaviors

Based on the data and videos accumulated over the years in the Amboseli National Reserve in Kenya and in the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, the couple were able to create an ethogram of the African elephant. It is the world's most complete audiovisual library on elephant behavior. It is posted on the Internet and anyone can read it.

Now that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed African savannah and African forest elephants as endangered species, the etoogram of Joyce and her husband has acquired special value. At the moment, there are 415,000 African elephants left on Earth, and this is very small considering that in 1950 there were approximately five million of them.

How did Joyce study elephants? At first, she began to notice their special postures and gestures that they made when pronouncing certain sounds, and record them on video. The couple began to work on the ethogram of African elephants in 2017 - only 35 years after they began observing these animals. From 2,400 videos of elephant behavior, the spouses chose the most representative examples of behavior and added written descriptions to them.

Poole's many years of work with elephants has confirmed how smart, empathetic and creative these giants are.

How elephants communicate

To communicate with their own kind, elephants use a variety of vocalizations - from powerful roars to low-frequency rumbles. Their sounds also include snorting, barking, grunting, trumpets, shouts, and even imitation sounds. These calls are important signals for the survival of the elephant family.

“Elephants are great team players,” Poole said. - in order to survive in nature, in opposition to such "intelligent predators" as people, it is important for the elephant family that the animals stick together and help each other. And I must say, the elephants have developed sophisticated communication as part of this teamwork.

For example, an elephant uses his body to point his fellows in the direction in which he wants to go. At the same time, he sometimes raises his leg. And to tell others "Let's go", the elephant makes rumbling sounds and flaps its ears.

Here is an illustrative example of communication between an elephant family, which was recorded by scientists on video. Mother Coral has a newborn male elephant that lags behind during the journey, being distracted by studying the soil. Another mother elephant tries to lead him, but Coral does not like her interference and she returns to drive her away and take him away. She gently pulls him along with her trunk and coos with him. As soon as he starts to move in the right direction, she turns and moves on. The baby falls silent again and his older brother, Kenki, gently pushes him forward.

The key to strengthening the bond within the family of these animals is greeting. For elephants, this is a whole ceremony. They emit a welcoming roar, raising their heads high, vigorously flapping their ears, extending their front legs to their relatives and touching family members with their trunks. At the same time, they have discharge from the temporal glands, and they also urinate and defecate. And sometimes the elephants show their excitement about being back together by clanking their tusks and spinning as if they were doing pirouettes.

“I was also amazed at how much time elephants spend thinking. To most people, the contemplating elephant looks like it is doing nothing. That is why most people are interested in watching the mating of these animals in the wild - here the elephants at least somehow manifest themselves, says the researcher. - After all, the rest of the time most elephants, even a happy couple, just stand and watch what is happening around. Males are immobile because they wait for the female to move.

Joyce says it's important for her to know what the elephants are saying to each other. She knows for sure that these animals say really difficult things.

“I guess they“talk”a lot about us - about people. And how they should react to us. In some habitats, elephants are afraid of people because of what they did to them. For example, in Gorongos, due to a long civil war from 1972 to 1992, elephants became very shy and aggressive towards humans.

The researcher said that in Gorongos, elephants from time to time issued a kind of call, which she had never heard before. It was very low in frequency, flat and pulsating.

- Thus, the elephant warned its relatives that we are dangerous. And in general, elephants are always under great stress due to the fact that they have to hear us and follow us all the time, - says the researcher.

African Savannah elephants are one of the most socially complex species (other than humans) on our planet, but their lives and behavior are increasingly dependent on humans. The elephant ethogram includes the rare, new and distinctive behavior of these animals, as well as those behaviors that they acquire as a result of social learning in response to rapidly growing anthropogenic threats.

The library of Poole and her husband includes not only understood and typical patterns of behavior, but also new, unusual ones, which researchers of elephants cannot yet explain. For example, they still cannot decipher the peculiar "squeak" emitted by elephants.

Elephants, as you know, are not timid animals. They shy away from people in the wild, but sometimes they themselves come to a person. An example of this is an article about cities, which are constantly attacked by wild animals.