elephants

Elephant Tracks and Child Safety Devices

gregladen — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:43:53 +0000

Elephant Tracks and Child Safety Devices

It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness.

As an anthropologist living with the Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, I often found myself observing some thing ... an object, a construction of some type, or a behavior ... that utterly baffled me. I learned to avoid asking about things as questions occurred to me; The very asking of a question, especially if you are roughly the equivalent of an alien visitor (an extraordinarily wealthy giant scary white being with highly advanced technology, which in this context, is what a poor American graduate student would be), is a significant act. It can stop people in their tracks, cause people to change what they are doing, even to question what they are doing, or change the nature of your relationship with the people you are trying to "blend in" with.

So, I was living with a particular "camp" (our term for an Efe residence group) and we had just moved to a new "camp" (our term for the place the residence group lives ... I know, English is a relatively primitive language, we often refer to multiple things by the same one syllable sound) and I noticed something strange. The camp itself consisted of eight or so round dome-shaped huts made of saplings and covered with giant Marantaceae leaves. The huts are more or less arranged around the outer edge of a clearing. Middens form quickly at the edge, consisting initially of the vegetation cleared from the clearing, then being augmented by kitchen waste. The cleared area is mostly exposed dirt which becomes muddy and quite slippery when it rains.

So, I was hanging out on one edge of the clearing trying to stay out of the way when I noticed one of the Efe men, the headman of the camp and my main informant, spending inordinate amounts of time chopping away at small lengths of wood and some vines, and working these materials as though making a basket or something, while everyone else was collecting Marantaceae leaves or pole-saplings for the huts or doing other camp set-up activities. Since he was working only in one small area, I figured I could meander over there later and see what he had done and eventually ask him about it, at a more appropriate time.

So, later that day I started wandering aimlessly about the camp taking things in, and in so doing, I made my way to the place where my friend had been working. There, I saw something that actually startled me and caused a minor flashback: There was a set of round holes in the ground each covered with a cage-like grate made of the saplings tied with vines that he had been working with. The reason this sight caused a flashback is unrelated to this story. Anyway, several ideas went through my mind as to what this was for. They were like little subterranean cages, but at present empty. The first thing I thought of was that some animal ... maybe a baby animal ... would be put in here if captured. Some Efe keep baby animals, often ducks, as pets for a short amount of time for amusement, and eventually, as a snack. I'd seen cages built for these critters before, but not underground like this. Then, it occurred to me that this could be a trap of some kind. Perhaps while setting up camp someone had detected the presence of a fossorial (underground living) creature like a colony of moles or something, and this was a way of trapping one. As an archaeologist, I knew that this could work .... moles traveling along in their preferred substrate poke through the wall of a hole, fall to the bottom, into harder subsoil, and are trapped for good. Maybe this was such a trap. But the spaces in the caging were too large to be an effective rodent trap.

Eventually, of course, things settled down in the new camp, food was being cooked, a few people had gone off to forage, and it was time to sit down and chat for a while. That was my opportunity to ask about the holes with the grates.

"So, what are those," pointing with my chin towards the traps.

"What?"

"Those holes with the sticks tied together like this," making a grate by holding my spread fingers of both hands at right angles to each other, not knowing the word for 'grate.'

"Over there? Those things? The feet places"?

"Feet places?" We were using a language that was my second language and that I had only been speaking for a few months, and that was his fifth language. Feet places ... hmm, what could that mean?

"Foot spots," he said. "Not so old elephant places of the many feet," was the next thing he said. And then it dawned on me.

"They were foot prints,"

"Yes, of elephants, but not just footprints. One specific spot like the Marantacae leaf spots you asked about the other day."

"Huh?"

"When we were walking via the trail by bat cave, and so-and-so dropped the leaf, and then so and so dropped his leaf, all on the same spot, to make a pile of leaves along the trail, and you asked about that."

Right. Previously, we had been walking along a trail and the man in front yanked a medium size Marantaceae leaf off of its stalk and laid it down on the trail at the base of a tree. This was common practice to point people following in the correct direction where a trail spit and conditions for observing footprints were poor. But this was a seemingly random spot with no splitting of trails, on a trail that no one had been on for a year, and thus, with no footprints.

After that first person dropped the leaf, most of the other men did the same thing so a small pile of leaves was formed. this was similar to a different practice, where one or two people, usually men, make a pile of leaves at the base of a tree that contains some resource, claiming the resource for later extraction. So I asked about that and was told there was no resource in this tree. There was no reason the men were dropping these leaves. It was just something they did "mbore." (No reason.)

So, now, I was being told that these holes with the grates were mbore like the pile of leaves.

"So, you dug the holes and put the grate there mbore. What does this have to do with elephants?"

Laughing.

"No, no, Gregoiri, the elephants dug the holes."

At this point, my friend stood up and did his imitation of an elephant walking, using his fists to represent the round stumpy feet of an elephant. He punched on fist repeatedly in one place.

"The elephants walk in a line, the biggest one first, the smallest one last." Yes, I knew this ... that particular elephant behavior was one way the Efe managed to hunt them. "Then the first one puts its foot in this one specific spot, like this" ... imitation of an elephant taking a step ... "then the second elephant puts its foot in the same exact spot" ... imitation of an elephant taking a step ... "and so on and so forth again and again" ... repeated imitations of elephants taking steps.

"Aha!" I cried out. "Like when the guys all drop the same leaf on one spot, the elephants all step in the same exact spot, making a big hole!"

"Absolutely!"

"So why do the elephants do this?!?!?"

"Mbore!"

Of course. No reason.

Over time I was to observe this phenomenon again and again. By chance or because the trail takes a somewhat sharp turn, many of the elephants put one or two of their feet in one of three or four spots to create a small line of round holes ranging in depth from about 20 cm to up to almost a meter. In this case, there were three holes one about 50 cm deep, the others shallow, and on inspection I could see that the elephants were probably curving their impromptu trail around the edge of the camp to avoid walking through it. At first that struck me as strange, but later I learned that this was normal procedure.

"OK, but," I asked my friend, "Why did you build one of these (making grate sign with my hands) over the holes."

"For the children."

"To play with?"

Laughter.

"So they don't fall in and hurt themselves! It's a child safety grate!"

~ ~ ~

And so .... this story about some fellow coon rapidians with a toddler who is able to get through a child safety lock put me in mind of the above story, and also sent me to Youtube for more examples of kids breaking through the anti-curiosity security systems that have been set up to keep them safe.

When Julia was little, rather than figuring out how to get through the locks, she figured out that these devices were there to limit her behavior, and more or less went along with it. She quickly learned that it was easier to get permission to explore some unsafe territory with supervision than to break through the lock. Huxley, in contrast, defines what is fun by what is disallowed. I am reticent to attribute this to innate gender differences. For now.

I think the videos above represent a range of problems, including the design of the safety device, lack of proper use, and the simple fact that humans are extra smart monkeys and you can't have doors and drawers that adults can open that are perfectly protected from access by the little ones.

gregladen Fri, 12/10/2010 - 04:43

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Africa

Anthropology

Ethnography

lost congo memoir

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"The elephants walk in a line, the biggest one first, the smallest one last."

And these blast points? Too accurate for Imperial Stormtroopers. Only Elephants are so precise.

Anyway, most of these child safety locks seem a bit...naivÃ©, to say the least. I guess one of the problems in designing an effective child safety lock are the ethical issues concerning the experiments you would need to conduct - still, some of them just appear half-assed from the get-go. The third one is on the right track, I think - basing the mechanism on the actual physical differences between adults and children (reach or weight), rather than on the assumption that children are stupid.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html

"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

Same thing applies to adults and children.

LMAO

When my daughter was old enough (much younger than 4) to start walking around the apartment I spent an hour and a half putting "child-proof" catches on the all the cabinets in the kitchen. I recall that was around 12 cabinets.

The type I put in operated on the same principle as the ones in the second video.

The whole time my daughter watched me intently from the other side of the safety gate. When I was done I demonstrated the proper opening technique to my wife. Then we let my daughter in.

Since her hands were smaller she actually opened the door faster than I could.

All the locks that try to hold the doors together are worthless.

Mike.

Child safety devices are only suggestions, like Stop Signs in Texas.

Greg, given that my niece and Huxley have the same definition of fun, I think it's probably safe to dismiss the idea of this as a gender difference. I dread the day my daughter can walk over to my giant precious TV and put her mitts all over the screen.

Luckily, our TV sucks and is the old fashioned kind with glass on the screen so it is easy to clean off. The trick is keeping Huxley from putting his stuff in the VHS slot (not that we use the VHS slot, but still...)

My in-laws tell me that when my partner was a toddler, they took to tying the kitchen cupboards shut with string to keep my partner and the pots safe from each other. This worked until the morning they came into the kitchen, only to find my partner happily re-tying the strings, having opened them earlier.

I always used two drawer locks that needed to be worked simultaneously with both hands. If the drawer was wide enough, a small child couldn't reach both at the same time.

Kids are smarter than they look.

My two year old nephew have a passion to get something that he saw, that's why mom bought a drawer where she can put all things inside, also my nephew can't reach it anymore. As we all know every child has a curious mind, if they saw something they will reach out for it. Sometimes if they can't they will cry, well that's their behavior. Let's just put our things in their proper places especially pointed objects.

Watched the videos...

No longer concerned about where the next generation of mechanical engineers will come from.

But some concerns about the current generation of them.

Emory, one could imagine a cycle that goes back and forth, like wolves vs deer but with alternating generations of engineers .

My husband says one of his earliest memories is of his older brother jailbreaking him (out of a child pen).

I suppose the right way to do child locks is just to do actual locks. Cost is a problem, but if it weren't...

Thumbprint scanners would be nifty. Even cooler would be a "skinplex" persona area network. The devices are already commercially available, though putting one on every drawer and cabinet in your house would currently be cost prohibitive unless you're filthy rich... though that will probably change in a decade or so.

Ey iman edenler, Allah'tan korkup-sakÄ±nÄ±rsanÄ±z, size doÄruyu yanlÄ±Åtan ayÄ±ran bir nur ve anlayÄ±Å (furkan) verir, kÃ¶tÃ¼lÃ¼klerinizi Ã¶rter ve sizi baÄÄ±Ålar. Allah bÃ¼yÃ¼k fazl sahibidir. (ENFAL SURESÄ° / 29)
Sen ancak, zikre (Kur'an'a) uyan ve gayb ile Rahman olan ( Allah ) 'a (karÅÄ±) iÃ§i titreyerek korku duyan kimseyi uyarÄ±rsÄ±n. Ä°Åte bÃ¶ylesini, bir baÄÄ±Ålanma ve Ã¼stÃ¼n bir ecirle mÃ¼jdele. (YASÄ°N SURESÄ° / 11)

I was the escape artist of the family. Figured out the locks and showed my siblings. I figured out how to climb out of my crib, climb onto the TV cabinet and eat the things (mostly CDs) stored up there.

So Which One Is the Pet?

mikethemadbiologist — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 08:34:36 +0000

So Which One Is the Pet?

I found this video of an elephant and her dog. Or is it a dog and her elephant?

Does anyone have any idea how these two might view each other? I don't think they view each other as conspecifics. Do they view each other as equals, or does one feel responsible for the other?

Either way, I want a pet elephant.

An aside: On a day wherein bigoted idiots are burning religious books, I think doggies and olophaunts are about all I can handle.

mikethemadbiologist Sat, 09/11/2010 - 04:34

Tags

Dogs

elephants

"I want a pet elephant."
You will also need a fair sized pooper scooper.
Cross species affection in pack animals outside their natural environment is not all that rare. My guess is that biology in animals that work in groups involves a fair number of bonding hormones and pathways. Normally, in the wild, these are all tied up in group dynamics. Outside they can glom onto whatever is around. I realize there are other elephants that are available in this setting, but this is far from their own pack and history of group dynamics.
Having dogs in my family makes me aware of the easy nature of cross-species affection and training.
With regards to the bigoted burning of religious books. It is silly. Even dumber is that in far off countries people are going to get hurt an even possibly die in even more idiotic protests against this silliness.
However, it is not just extremists, far more worrying is that large hordes of Americans have bought into the meme that somehow this cultural center is being build to raise a finger to the US population in celebration of 9/11.

Thank u

I want a pet elephant."
You will also need a fair sized pooper scooper.
Cross species affection in pack animals outside their natural environment is not all that rare. My guess is that biology in animals that work in groups involves a fair number of bonding hormones and pathways. Normally, in the wild, these are all tied up in group dynamics. Outside they can glom onto whatever is around. I realize there are other elephants that are available in this setting, but this is far from their own pack and history of group dynamics.
Having dogs in my family makes me aware of the easy nature of cross-species affection and training.
With regards to the bigoted burning of religious books. It is silly. Even dumber is that in far off countries people are going to get hurt an even possibly die in even more idiotic protests against this silliness.
However, it is not just extremists, far more worrying is that large hordes of Americans have bought into the meme that somehow this cultural center is being build to raise a finger to the US population

You will also need a fair sized pooper scooper.
Cross species affection in pack animals outside their natural environment is not all that rare. My guess is that biology in animals that work in groups involves a fair number of bonding hormones and pathways. Normally, in the wild, these are all tied up in group dynamics. Outside they can glom onto whatever is around. I realize there are other elephants that are available in this setting, but this is far from their own pack and history of group dynamics.
Having dogs in my family makes me aware of the easy nature of cross-species affection and training yes thnk you

Yes thank you very good

With regards to the bigoted burning of religious books. It is silly. Even dumber is that in far off countries people are going to get hurt an even possibly die in even more idiotic protests against this silliness.
However, it is not just extremists, far more worrying is that large hordes of Americans have bought into the meme that somehow this cultural center is being build to raise a finger to the US thank you

Elephants and humans evolved similar solutions to problems of gas-guzzling brains

edyong — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:04:24 +0000

Elephants and humans evolved similar solutions to problems of gas-guzzling brains

At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly).

But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need a lot of energy. Faced with similarly pressing fuel demands, humans and elephants have developed similar adaptations in a set of genes used in our mitochondria - small power plants that supply energy to our cells. The genes in question are "aerobic energy metabolism (AEM)" genes - they govern how the mitochondria metabolise nutrients in food, in the presence of oxygen.

We already knew that the evolution of AEM genes has accelerated greatly since our ancestors split away from those of other monkeys and apes. While other mutations were reshaping our brain and nervous system, these altered AEM genes helped to provide our growing cortex with much-needed energy.

Now, Morris Goodman from Wayne State University has found evidence that the same thing happened in the evolution of modern elephants. It's a good thing too - our brain accounts for a fifth of our total demand for oxygen but the elephant's brain is even more demanding. It's the largest of any land mammal, it's four times the size of our own and it requires four times as much oxygen.

Goodman was only recently furnished with the tools that made his discovery possible - the full genome sequences of a number of oddball mammals, including the lesser hedgehog tenrec (Echinops telfairi). As its name suggests, the tenrec looks like a hedgehog, but it's actually more closely related to elephants. Both species belong to a major group of mammals called the afrotherians, which also include aardvarks and manatees.

Goodman compared the genomes of 15 species including humans, elephants, tenrecs and eight other mammals and looked for genetic signatures of adaptive evolution. The genetic code is such as that a gene can accumulate many changes that don't actually affect the structure of the protein it encodes. These are called "synonymous mutations" and they are effectively silent. Some genetic changes do, however, alter protein structure and these "non-synonymous mutations" are more significant and more dramatic, for even small tweaks to a protein's shape can greatly alter its effectiveness. A high ratio of non-synonymous mutations compared to synonymous ones is a telltale sign that a gene has been the target of natural selection.

And sure enough, elephants have more than twice as many genes with high ratios of non-synonymous mutations to synonymous ones than tenrecs do, particularly among the AEM genes used in the mitochondria. In the same way, humans have more of such genes compared to mice (which are as closely related to us, as tenrecs are to elephants).

These changes have taken place against a background of less mutation, not more. Our lineage, and that of elephants, has seen slower rates of evolution among protein-coding genes, probably due to the fact that the duration of our lives and generations have increased. Goodman speculates that with lower mutation rates, we'd be less prone to developing costly faults in our DNA every time it was copied anew.

Overall, his conclusion was clear - in the animals with larger brains, a suite of AEM genes had gone through an accelerated burst of evolution compared to our mini-brained cousins. Six of our AEM genes that appear to have been strongly shaped by natural selection even have elephant counterparts that have gone through the same process.

Of course, humans and elephants are much larger than mice and tenrecs. But our genetic legacy isn't just a reflection of our bigger size, for Goodman confirmed that AEM genes hadn't gone through a similar evolutionary spurt in animals like cows and dogs.

Goodman's next challenge is to see what difference the substituted amino acids would have made to us and elephants and whether they make our brains more efficient at producing aerobic energy. He also wants to better understand the specific genes that have been shaped the convergent evolution of human and elephant brains over the course of evolution. That task should certainly become easier as more and more mammal genomes are published.

Reference: PNAS doi:10.1073/pnas.0911239106

More on elephants:

edyong Mon, 11/16/2009 - 11:04

Categories

Life Sciences

Interesting. Both humans and elephants forage in water and on land, and are very social. Had just read this article on tiny brains:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33974286/ns/technology_and_science-science/

That may also just be an adaption for living longer lives, as oxidative metabolism leads to reactive oxygen species (ROS) which affect cell aging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_Oxygen_Species

Birds and turtles, which live longer than similar sized mammals, also have altered oxygen metabolism genes.

South African wildlife - Wait, that's not a trunk...

edyong — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:00:38 +0000

South African wildlife - Wait, that's not a trunk...

This is a bull elephant firmly establishing why it is he, and not the lion, who is king of beasts. The elephant's penis is not only massive but prehensile. As we watched in baffled amusement (and the faintest tinge of inadequacy), he used his penis to prop himself up (as in the photo), swat flies from his side and scratch himself on his stomach. David Attenborough never showed us that...

There's good reason for elephants to have prehensile penises. It's hard enough for a six-tonne animal to get into the right position for sex, let alone having to do the rhythmic thrusting that's required. So he let's his penis do all the work for him.

You'll also note the dark stain behind his eye - that's a leak from his temporal gland. It means that this male was entering musth, the period when their testosterone shoots through the roof and they get incredibly horny and aggressive. We tried to drive round this male and he basically charged us. Tramply doom was averted by our driver who slammed his palm against the car door as hard as he could. The elephant stopped and huffed and puffed. We did our best to not soil ourselves.

This picture gives you an idea of how close he was. After a seemingly infinite standstill, he moved aside, extended his enormous penis and had a wee. It's amazing how terror can convert into comedy so quickly...

edyong Sat, 11/07/2009 - 02:00

Tags

animals

elephants

mammals

South African wildlife

I was once accosted on the stairs of the old geology building in Helsinki by Michael Fortelius. He pressed a paper into my hand and ran off with a smile. The paper was about testicondy in elephants - their balls don't drop.

The point of the paper was that because of this they have a higher mutation rate, and this might explain the high rate of diversification of the elephants, mammoths etc. in the fossil record.

I just thought you might like to know this.

Oh. my. heavens.

If not for the testicondy, there might be some "tusks" accompanying that 'trunk'?

Reminds me of doing research in Botswana - we used to sex the fresh dung by the pattern of urine deposited with it. In males the urine was in front of the dung (for obvious reasons), sometimes by a looong way... I can definitely confirm that being charged by a male in musth is a very scary experience, especially when you are on foot not too far away from it!

..... and even more so if you happen to turn your back on the elephant.....

"tramply doom"

My favourite term for today.

It looks to me like the first photo is of an elephant with a deformed back left leg.

You're pulling our leg, aren't you?!

Was redirected here from an article on Cracked.com and I must say, your writing style rocks. Loved it as much as the article content.

I love that Cracked.com is citing me as an expert in elephant todgers.

CRACKED!!!!!!!

Well now i know how to linked on cracked.com

Directed here from CRACKED.com as well. I too appreciate your writing style and will henceforth be a regular visitor.

Cheers

I would really like to put my ex-husband in the pen with this bull. They behave similarly.

Also linked here from cracked. Just added your blog to my bookmarks tab next to Pharyngula :)

I enjoyed your writing style, too.

I also linked here from Cracked. :-)

South African wildlife - Elephant encounter

edyong — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:40:36 +0000

South African wildlife - Elephant encounter

We had numerous elephant sightings on our South Africa trip including a few family groups and a couple of lone males. Seeing them in documentaries or in zoos never quite captures just how big and impressive they are in the flesh, especially when they do things like beat up a tree. Note how this male uses his tusks and trunks to break off branches.

Also note how quiet it is except for the breaking of branches. Elephants may look like lumbering beasts, but their footfalls are dainty and quiet. They are 'digitigrade', meaning that they walk on their toes like a cat or a dog. Their heels rest on a spongy cushion that gives their foot its flat, round appearance - they've essentially got the world's largest platform shoes. And that means that walking elephants make precious little noise. You could watch a group disappear behind a bush about 10 metres away and have absolutely no idea that they were there.

edyong Sun, 11/01/2009 - 03:40

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South African wildlife

Elephants smell the difference between human ethnic groups

edyong — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:00:11 +0000

Elephants smell the difference between human ethnic groups

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.

It's tempting to think that elephants have their own PR agency. Just last week, their mighty reputation was damaged by the revelation that they are scared away by bees but they have bounced back with a new study that cements their standing among the most intelligent of animals.

Lucy Bates and colleagues from the University of St Andrews have found that African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can tell the difference between different human ethnic groups by smell alone. They also react appropriately to the level of threat they pose.

The Massai, for example, are a group of cattle-herders, whose young men sometimes prove themselves by spearing elephants. Clearly, it would pay to be able to sort out these humans from those who post little threat, like the Kamba.

At the Amboseli National Park in Kenya, Bates found that elephants reacted more fearfully to clothes previously worn by a Massai man than to clean ones or those worn by a Kamba man. She placed the three types of cloth near 18 family groups and watched what happened.

When the first individual caught whiff of a new scent, it raised its head and curled its trunk towards the source of the smell. If they smelled Massai clothes, they moved away particularly fast, travelled about five times further and took more than twice as long to relax. They could clearly tell the difference between the two groups based on smell and reacted more defensively to the dangerous one.

Every single time the elephants smelled Massai on the wind, they moved downwind and didn't stop until they reached tall elephant grass, over 1m in height. They only sought tall grass in about half of the trials with Kamba clothes, and almost none of the trials with clean clothes. To Bates, this was a clear sign of planned action for elephant grass only covers about 7% of Amboseli.

In all cases, the elephants never approached within 10m of the clothes and wouldn't have seen them. They reacted on smell alone. It's possible that the Massai and Kamba exude different pheromones, but their distinctive scents possibly stem from their vastly contrasting cultures.

The Kamba eat meat, vegetables and maize meal. The Massai, on the other hand, subsist mainly on milk and cattle meat and their villages are suffused by the smells of their herds. They also use ochre and sheep fat for decorations. To an elephant's sensitive trunks, the resulting smells must be as different as red and green beacons are to our eyes.

Visual cues worked too - while most African groups wear a wide range of colours, the Massai traditionally wear a striking red. Bates found that when the elephants saw clean, unworn red cloths, they reacted much more aggressively than they did to clean white ones, even though red is a fairly drab colour to elephant eyes.

Bates believes that the smell of Massai triggers a strong fear in the elephants that overrides whatever their eyes tell them. If the elephant sees the distinctive colour of the Massai but doesn't smell them, it's lack of fear allows aggression to come to the forefront.

Seven of the families included individuals that had faced spears over the last 30 years, and two individuals in particular had a history of violence towards Massai cattle. But neither of these factors affected the elephants' reactions. Even groups that were personally inexperienced with Massai spears showed similarly strong reactions to the veterans.

Like the recent bee study, this once again shows that elephants rely heavily on shared knowledge, even between different family groups. Elephants groups have complex social structures and they can recognise individuals in the group by their calls. They appear to recognise the bones of dead elephants and mourn members of their group who pass away.

Many non-human animals including meerkats, vervet monkeys and prairie dogs can classify predators into different groups and react accordingly to the type of threat they pose. But so far, the elephant's ability to split members of a single species into further sub-groups is a unique one.

More on elephants:

Reference: Bates, Sayialel, Njiraini, Moss, Poole & Byrne. 2007. Elephants classify human ethnic groups by odor and garment color. 2007. Curr Biol 17, 1-5.

edyong Sun, 09/27/2009 - 04:00

Tags

That is fascinating, especially their reaction to the red clothing.

Amazing. Great post, Ed.

Y'know, I always wished David Brin could've included elephants in his Uplift novels somehow.

I always wished David Brin could've included elephants in his Uplift novels somehow.

it's pretty far from the same thing, but Howard Tayler did work uplifted elephants into Schlock Mercenary, to great comedic effect at times.

But can they differentiate between mice by smell?

I would think it a sign of greater intelligence to be afraid of those african bees rather than a sign of weakness. They can be nasty.

Elephants do share knowledge between family groups. Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell has discovered much about elephant communication, particularly seismic communication. There's a press release on her work, with links: http://www.the-aps.org/press/releases/09/40.htm.

Buzzing bees scare elephants away

edyong — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:00:11 +0000

Buzzing bees scare elephants away

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.

It's a myth that elephants are afraid of mice, but new research shows that they're not too keen on bees. Even though they fearlessly stand up to lions, the mere buzzing of bees is enough to send a herd of elephants running off. Armed with this knowledge, African farmers may soon be able to use strategically placed hives or recordings to minimise conflicts with elephants.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Fritz Vollrath from Kenyan conservation charity Save the Elephants first suspected this elephantine phobia in 2002, when they noticed that elephants were less likely to damage acacia trees that contained beehives.

Animals as powerful as the African elephant can go largely untroubled by predators. Their bulk alone protects them from all but the most ambitious of lion prides.

But these defences do nothing against the African bees, which can sting them in their eyes, behind their ears and inside their trunks. Against these aggressive insects, the elephants are well justified in their caution and local people have reported swarms of bees chasing elephants for long distances.

Lucy King, a graduate student from the University of Oxford confirmed this theory by using camouflaged wireless speakers to play recordings of angry buzzing bees to herds of elephants resting under trees.

The buzzing caused almost unanimous alarm. The elephants stopped what they were doing and scanned their surroundings with raised heads, spread ears and swishing trunks. Within 10 seconds of hearing the recording, almost half of the families had fled with their tails in the air, occasionally throwing backwards glances at the speakers. By the 80 second mark, all but one were gone.

In contrast, only 7 groups scattered when they heard a control recording - a burst of white noise extracted from the recording of a waterfall. And King's data suggests that these groups moved out of irritation rather than fear.

Seven of the groups that fled the buzzing ran away and another four walked fast; when the white noise was played, the groups that moved did so leisurely. The groups that were buzzed off also moved about 60 metres away from the recording, more than three times the distance that the white noise groups did.

King notes that her study doesn't show how the elephants come to develop their phobia of bees. Naive individuals may have learnt the lesson the hard way - from being stung - or may learn what to do from watching more experienced adults. The single group that stood its ground suggests that the second theory may be right.

This group was unusually small and young for an elephant herd, consisting only of a young 20-year old male, a 14-year old female and her calf. Usually, herds have several older adults and a matriarch who leads them.

It could be that none of the three elephants had been stung themselves, and without an experienced leader, they didn't know the right response. King notes that this highlights how important social structures are to elephants, where youngsters learn appropriate behaviours from their elders.

King, Douglas-Hamilton and Vollrath hope that their discovery could be put to practical use. In many parts of Africa, expanding human settlements are pushing elephants into ever-smaller ranges, leading to mounting conflicts between the two species.

The pachyderms frequently raid crops causing massive economic losses. Some scientists believe that elephants may even be suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder and be acting out of spite. Fencing the elephants out with electric wiring and fortifications are expensive and difficult to maintain.

Bees, on the other hand, could provide a simple and profitable solution and the trio now plan to test this idea using a combination of actual hives and powerful loudspeakers. Strategically placed hives could not only deter marauding elephants, but also produce sellable honey - it's a win-win situation that's incredibly rare in conservation.

More on elephants: Elephants can recognise themselves in a mirror

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Reference: King, Douglas-Hamilton & Vollrath. 2007. African elephants run from the sound of disturbed bees. Curr Biol 17: R832-833.

edyong Fri, 09/25/2009 - 04:00

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Zoo elephants die much earlier than wild ones

edyong — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:30:55 +0000

Zoo elephants die much earlier than wild ones

Elephants always count as star attractions in any zoo or wildlife park lucky enough to have them. But while many visitors may thrill to see such majestic creatures in the flesh, some scientists have raised concerns about how well animals so sociable and intelligent would fare in even the best of zoo environments.

Now, a new study suggests that some of these concerns might be warranted. Ros Clubb from the RSPCA, together with colleagues from various universities and the Zoological Society of London, studied the health of zoo elephants with a census of mammoth proportions.

Concentrating on females, she surveyed 786 captive elephants, representing about half the total zoo population. She compared them to about 3,000 individuals who either live wild in protected Amboseli National Park in Kenya or who are employed by the Burmese logging industry.

The survey revealed incredible differences in the life spans between the captive and wild creatures. On average, African elephants in Amboseli live for about 56 years, while those born in zoos lasted a mere 17 years. Even wild elephants that were killed by humans managed a good 36 years of life. These grim statistics were due to adult females dying much earlier - the death rates among Infant and juvenile individuals were the same in both wild and captive populations.

For Asian elephants, the picture was similar. Those that worked in natural environments for the Burmese logging industry lived longer, averaging a lifespan of 42 years, compared to a figure of just 19 of their zoo-born peers. In their case, infant deaths accounted for much of the difference made a massive difference and the death rate was twice as high among newborns at the zoo than in those in Burma.

Clubb thinks that the low infant survival among zoo-born Asian elephants is due to very early events in their lives, possibly even before they leave their mothers' wombs. Indeed, even elephants that are captured from the wild (usually at the age of 3-4 years) have higher life expectancies than those born to captivity.

Things have certainly improved. Clubb found that in recent years, the lifespan of zoo elephants had increased, but their odds of dying early were still about 3 times higher than those of their wild cousins. And the poor infant death rates for Asian elephants hadn't improved. Asian elephants are also sensitive to being shuttled around between zoos, particularly if calves are separated from mothers, and such transfers can affect their health up to four years later.

Clubb points the finger at stress and obesity as the main factors behind the earlier demise of zoo elephants. The problems highlighted in this survey back up a large amount of anecdotal evidence. In 2002, the RSPCA conducted a review of European zoo elephants, which found worrying rates of herpes, tuberculosis, lameness and infertility and of adults killing calves. And zookeepers are well aware that, unlike many other animals, elephants cannot be kept in captivity with enough success to create self-sustaining populations - new individuals need to be brought in from elsewhere.

If this new study is to be believed (and it will undoubtedly provoke strong responses from zoos), the biggest remaining question is whether the benefits to keeping elephants in zoos, in terms of both education and conservation, are large enough to justify the costs that such homes could exert on their health? It would also be interesting to see a deeper study looking at the extent to which the quality of a zoo affect an elephant's lifespan. Put simply, there are zoos and then there are zoos.

Reference: Science 10.1126/science.1164298

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edyong Fri, 12/12/2008 - 02:30

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Many elephants in zoos are kept in enclosures that are too small for them. This is why more and more zoos are shutting down their elephant exhibits and sending their elephants to a couple of zoos (mostly in the southern USA, like the one in Asheville NC) which have large expanses of land for elephants and are specifically geared for keeping these animals in captivity, breeding them and taking care of them properly. This recent trend may be the cause of the recent slight improvement in the lifespan numbers you mention - the numbers are averages of many zoos. I am assuming that as more and more zoos abandon keeping elephants, and send them to those few zoos that can keep them, the statistics will improve more. Will they ever match the lifespans in the wild is an open question at this time.

I heard about this on NPR this morning. It's awful. They also interviewed the president of an organization in Britain/Ireland which is dedicated to improving the lives of confined elephants by giving them larger enclosures and more interesting things to do with their time.

The sad thing is that elephants, particularly the Asian species, are under such threat right now that keeping them in some sort of zoo may be the only alternative to extinction.

I think you're both absolutely right. The trends in this study are obviously very broad, both in terms of location and time. No one ought to conclude that keeping any elephants in any zoos is wrong, but we should use it as a starting point to ask some questions about the minimum standards that these animals need to be kept in. And obviously, weighing that up against the need for conservation and education.

I jumped in on this, adding my experience with the Philly Zoo elephants, here.

Has anyone been in Asheville Zoo? I am planning to visit this coming spring.

Oscar: Yes, a bunch of SciBlings went there in September. I love the Asheboro Zoo and always recommend it to visitors.

And it's Asheboro, not Asheville - sorry for the late-night typo.

Elephants crave companionship in unfamiliar stomping grounds

edyong — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:30:18 +0000

Elephants crave companionship in unfamiliar stomping grounds

Moving to a new area can be a daunting experience, especially if you don't know anyone. At first, you might cling to any friends who do live nearby but eventually, you meet new people and start to integrate. As it is with humans, so it is with elephants.

Noa Pinter-Wollman and colleagues from the University of California, Davis wanted to study how African elephants behave when they move to new environments. This happens quite naturally as elephants live in dynamic societies where small family groups continuously merge with, and separate from, each other. But they also face new territories with increasing regularity as human activity encroaches on their home ranges and forces them further afield, and as increasing conservation efforts lead to individuals being deliberately moved, or exchanged between zoos and wildlife parks.

Pinter-Wollman took advantage of just one such forced relocation to see how the animals would react. In September 2005, in an effort to reduce conflicts between humans and elephants, Kenya's Wildlife Service moved 150 individuals from the Shimba Hills National Reserve to the Tsavo East National Park, some 160km away. They consisted of 20 groups of around 7 individuals each - mainly adult females and calves - and 20 independent males. Their new home was very different to their old one and Pinter-Wollman wanted to see how they reacted to it.

By identifying the immigrants through ties on their tails and numbers on their backs, she found that, at first, they elephants spent a lot of time with others. But they became socially segregated and would mostly interact with other migrants, largely to the exclusion of the local Tsavo elephants. Their amity wasn't solely due to family, just familiarity - the newcomers would happily mix with other unrelated groups from their same home region. And the more the immigrants stuck together, the less likely they were to mingle with the locals.

Over time, things changed. A year later and the displaced elephants had become much less segregated, moving from a closed enclave into an integrated part of the social structure within their new home. But on the whole, they also became less sociable as time went by, with both new acquaintances and comrades from home.

This is the first study to look at how an animal's desire for companionship changes depending on how well they know their environment. Pinter-Wollman says that the elephants' behaviour suggests that in the face of unfamiliar ground, it pays them to associate with others so that they can learn from one another. Indeed, among the migrants, the most sociable ones were also in better health (although this could be because sick elephants are shunned). Over time, they become more familiar with their new stomping grounds and the need to socialise lessens.

The initial social segregation probably reflects the strong social ties that elephants have. While it would benefit the newcomers to learn about their new environment from the natives, that may not have been possible. On two anecdotal occasions, she saw the locals behaving aggressively towards the unfamiliar elephants in their midst. It's behaviour that really seems all-too-human.

Reference: doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.1538

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edyong Thu, 12/11/2008 - 01:30

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Sequencing a mammoth genome

edyong — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:00:35 +0000

Sequencing a mammoth genome

About 18,545 years ago, give or take a few decades, a woolly mammoth died. Succumbing to causes unknown, the creature was buried in Siberian snow. Many other mammoths must have met similar fates but this one, which we now know as M4, is special. Almost 20 millennia later, its beautifully preserved remains were unearthed by scientists who have revealed both its body and its genetic code. For the first time, the genome of an extinct species has been sequenced almost to completion.

Webb Miller from Pennsylvania State University together with a large team of American and Russian scientists has just published about 70% of the full mammoth genome. Currently, about 3.3 billion of those base pairs are known and Miller's group estimate that the full sequence would weigh in at about 4.7 billion base pairs, making it fairly... well... mammoth in size. If the estimate is right, the mammoth genome was about 40% larger than a human's but about the same size as a modern elephant's.

So we don't have a complete picture yet, but it's a major technical advance nonetheless. Sequencing ancient genomes is no easy task and just a few years ago, it would have been little more than a flight of fancy. The obstacles were numerous - traces of ancient DNA are hard to come by; when they are extracted, they are broken into tiny fragments and swamped by DNA from nearby bacteria and fungi; and the sequencing technology at the time simply wasn't fast enough.

The first two problems were actually solved by nature thousands of years ago. While fossilisation does little for preserving DNA, the freezing process that many mammoth carcasses were subjected to was much kinder. It safeguarded their hair, a rich source of DNA that is well protected from the damaging elements and the contaminating genes of microbes.

The final technological hurdle was leapt in 2005, with the advent of a new technique called 454 sequencing that was 100 to 1,000 times faster than the favoured method of the time. In the three years since, the method has become five times faster still and can now handle billions of base pairs in a single run, allowing individual laboratories to sequence in months what international collaborations used to take years to accomplish.

Miller's group leapt onto the new tool and mere months after the technology was available, they had used it to sequence about 13 million base pairs of mammoth DNA, about 3% of its full genome. The team went on to sequence the DNA of the mammoth's mitochondria - small structures inside complex cells that contains its own mini-genome and accounts for just 13 of the mammoth's thousands of genes. It was an important step, but small potatoes compared to the much bigger task of sequencing its nuclear genome.

To do that, the team turned to M4 and another specimen called M25 (English readers will chuckle at awarding that name to a permanently frozen, unmoving giant), and sequenced over 4 billion base pairs between the two individuals.

Accuracy was a big issue.After all, 454 sequencing is a "shotgun" technique, meaning that it simultaneously analyses many small chunks of DNA and pieces the data together later. It's fast, but error-prone and every genome needs to be sequenced many times over to get a reliable draft. But with such a blisteringly fast technique and so many hair samples, that wasn't a problem. The mammoths provided so much hair that the team could sift for long, well-preserved chunks of DNA that would give better readings than the usual short fragments.

To get a benchmark for accuracy, Miller also analysed the mitochondrial DNA from these new specimens and compared it to their previous accurate sequence. He estimates that the new readings have a small error rate of about one in 700. He also compared the mammoth genome with the draft version of the African savannah elephant genome, to discriminate sequences that came from contaminating microbes from those that actually belonged to the mammoth. On average, about 80% of the readouts were definitely mammoth in origin and M4 in particular provided excellent samples.

To finish the job and publish a complete and accurate genome, Miller needs the final elephant version and about 10-30 times more mammoth sequences. For the moment, the combined nuclear and mitochondrial sequences tell us a bit more about elephant evolution. They suggest that the elephant family had split down three different paths about 7 million years ago, one leading to the small Asian elephant, one that begat two species of African elephants and one that led to the mammoths. And about 1.5 million years ago, the woolly mammoth had split into two genetically distinct sub-populations, as represented by M4 and M25 today.

During this process, the different groups were evolving very slowly at a genomic level. Genetically, the modern elephant is 99.4% identical to its extinct woolly cousin. In comparison, humans and chimps have about twice as many differences in our DNA, even though our lineages diverged from each other at about the same time as the two elephant species did.

The similar DNA would have given rise to similar proteins and Miller estimates that the average mammoth protein would have differed from its elephant counterpart by only one amino acid across its entire length. But these small differences may have had large effects. After all, Miller found many cases where the mammoth had unique and unusual amino acids at positions that are otherwise exactly the same in about 50 other species of back-boned animals. These changes could have contributed to important changes in mammoth evolution, such as their adaptation to extremely cold climates.

The complete genome will hopefully tell us more about these adaptations, and potentially give us clues as to why the mammoth went extinct and just how many species there were. With such data, we can use genetic information, as well as fossils, to answer questions about the life of this majestic species. We could even potentially bring one back to life.

Cynics might argue that the mammoth genome, in its current unfinished state, tells us very little, save that it is possible to eventually sequence the whole lot. And while that's certainly true, it surely is amazing in itself. Miller's work provides a stark demonstration that the genomes of creatures long dead are not beyond the reach of our understanding. Sequencing extinct genomes is not only possible, but it can be done in a very short space of time by few scientists working on comparatively small budgets. The full Neanderthal genome is surely next.

Reference: Webb Miller, Daniela I. Drautz, Aakrosh Ratan, Barbara Pusey, Ji Qi, Arthur M. Lesk, Lynn P. Tomsho, Michael D. Packard, Fangqing Zhao, Andrei Sher, Alexei Tikhonov, Brian Raney, Nick Patterson, Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, Eric S. Lander, James R. Knight, Gerard P. Irzyk, Karin M. Fredrikson, Timothy T. Harkins, Sharon Sheridan, Tom Pringle, Stephan C. Schuster (2008). Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth Nature, 456 (7220), 387-390 DOI: 10.1038/nature07446

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edyong Wed, 11/19/2008 - 07:00

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They can clone frozen mice and now this - Do we get to have Pleistocene Park in the near future? Cuz that would be totally cool.

Wow. I had not idea gene sequencing had come so far. Of course I had Jurrasic Park in my head as I read this.

When you said that a Neanderthal's genome was also in reach, that made me stop and imagine the implications.

I wonder if we will eventually try to bring these to life? In a way, I kinda hope not. Maybe man wasn't meant to know everything.

Well one line of reasoning for cloning a mammoth (and there's a great feature in Nature on how we could go about doing this) is that it would be awesome, in the literal rather than the internet sense of the word. It would stimulate a fantastic amount of excitement, particularly among the younger generation, and that's certainly no bad thing for science. I suspect the same argument would be infinitely harder to make for Neanderthals. For a start, who would you use as a host?

Less it get in the hands of rogue carnival shows ... (that would never happen)

-yes, webb miller and his team have obtained 3,4Gb out of the 4,7Gb estimated mammoth genome size but, as far as i understand,it doesn'make 70% sequencing because in these shot-gun sequencing techniques part of the genome is sequenced many times.
-the actual percentage has been evaluated to 50% when considering, for instance, the fraction of african elephant ultraconserved sequences found in the mammoth genome.
thank you very much for your sc blog, I wonder how you have the time to do so many things!!
franÃ§oise ibarrondo, a biology high school teacher in paris.

Yes, Webb Miller and his team have obtained 3,4Gb out of the 4,7Gb estimated mammoth genome size but, as far I understand, it doesn't make 70% sequencing because, in these shot-gun sequencing techniques, part of the genome is sequenced many times.

The actual percentage has been evaluated to 50% when considering, for instance, the fraction of african elephant ultraconserved sequences found in the mammoth genome.

Thank you very much for your Science blog ; I wonder you have the time to do so many things !

FranÃ§oise,biology high school teacher in Paris, France