The Critical Role of Elders in Elephant Social Learning and Survival

Young elephants have a lot to learn—what to eat, what to avoid, how to behave around others. When they grow up around their mother and aunts, their development into well-behaved adults may seem natural and spontaneous. But the fallout of poaching and misguided population management in the past reveals they do much better if they can follow the example of older animals.

Elephants in populations that lost or lack older individuals tend to have a lower chance of survival, spend less time with others and respond less accurately to threats, says behavioral ecologist Lucy Bates of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. She led an analysis published last year analyzing 95 scientific studies about disrupted elephant populations in Africa and Asia.When old elephants disappear from their communities, Bates and colleagues explain, so does their culture, the knowledge that is gained with age and transferred across generations.

“They usually do survive when the elders are gone,” she says. “But many more nuanced aspects of their behavior may be lost.” This imperils not just elephants themselves, but also the animals and people they live alongside.

One of the most famous examples of an elephant population that grew up without elders is the group of orphaned savanna elephants that were moved into a park called Pilanesberg in South Africa in the 1980s and 90s. Their adult relatives had been shot in Kruger National Park—not by poachers, but by park managers, who felt the number of elephants had become too high, and believed the youngsters’ instincts would suffice to survive.

These elephants were likely traumatized, says behavioral ecologist Graeme Shannon of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, who studied the animals from 2007 to 2010. His experiments suggested they also lacked crucial knowledge when compared to elephants from the large and healthy population in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where he worked as well.

To further understand this impact, Shannon and colleagues played sounds they’d recorded from elephants in the park and elsewhere from large speakers in the back of a car. In Amboseli, groups led by older females clearly identified these sounds, looking to welcome a family friend, but gathering around the calves in defense when they heard the sound of a stranger approaching. In Pilanesberg, on the other hand, where elder females were missing, groups responded equally defensively to all of the recordings. They also didn’t react differently to the sounds of young or (often more dangerous) older elephants, nor did they seem to distinguish between the roars of one or three lions—or male and female ones—unlike Amboseli groups.

In Amboseli, young elephants gradually learn when to be careful by watching the adults in the group, says Shannon, and to not worry too much otherwise. “The overly anxious behavior of orphaned elephants must be very exhausting to them,” he says.

The Pilanesberg orphaned elephants were unusually aggressive to staff, visitors and researchers, and out-of-control young males killed dozens of white rhinos in the park. These bouts of aggression only subsided when the park introduced six older, more dominant males the younger ones could tag along with and learn from.

Male elephants are often seen as loners, says Shannon, but they do seek the company of other males when they leave the female-led group they grew up in. And because they will more often be on their own later on, it might be even more important for them to learn how to behave like a grown-up. The situation in Pilanesberg may have been due partly to trauma rather than lack of learning as such, but these studies reveal the many subtleties young elephants are picking up from their elders.

Decades of observations in Amboseli have revealed many more examples highlighting the importance of learning from other elephants, says evolutionary ecologist Phyllis Lee of the University of Stirling, United Kingdom. Young elephants are often seen extending their trunks to smell or taste what others are eating, or to smell the liquids elephants secrete from the glands on their temples when they are emotionally aroused. “They do look very eager to learn,” she says.

Intriguingly, mothers even appear to teach their daughters how to attract a visiting male, Lee explains. “Even if she has no interest in mating, a mother may present herself to a male and do little ‘run-outs’ to convince a male to follow her, just to show her daughter how it’s done and get her a good mate if she can. Then as soon as her daughter has mated, she’ll be ignoring the male.”

Research has shown that young females are more likely to successfully raise a first calf while their mother is raising one herself, says Lee. Groups led by older females also tend to lose fewer calves, and have higher survival in general. The effect on population numbers is more mixed. While the orphan population in a relatively benign place like Pilanesberg did quickly grow, in more challenging areas like Mikumi National Park in Tanzania, populations that lost many elders to poaching are often still struggling to bounce back, perhaps for lack of experience on how to survive droughts.

If such knowledge, accumulated across generations, is lost when older animals are killed or social ties are severed, it may take a long time for it to be rediscovered, and some of it may even be gone forever. Most wildlife managers have taken this lesson to heart—efforts are usually made to move groups as a whole instead of breaking them up. But trophy hunters still often target older individuals for their tusks, underestimating their importance of elders for the survival of younger animals.

Learning from others also appears to play a key role in how elephants relate and respond to humans. Studies have shown that elephants living in areas with different human groups respond more fearfully to people from groups known to occasionally kill elephants than those that don’t, says Bates. In some of her own work, she has shown that elephants also seem more afraid of the smell of clothes worn by people from groups that might pose a threat to them. “They’ll walk away from the smell of other people too,” she says. “But in this case, they run and keep running.”

When they are aware of humans’ whereabouts, elephants tend to steer clear. In Amboseli, elephants have been observed lingering at a distance until local herders were done watering their cattle. Yet when elephants are surprised and feel unable to get away, they do sometimes kill cattle – and occasionally people too. Some elephants even pick up on people’s schedules—laborers at a coffee plantation in southern India started running into elephants when they extended their working hours, for example.

Not everything young elephants learn from older relatives helps them avoid trouble with humans, however. A male elephant group in Kenya was seen pushing its youngest member through a fence, teaching it a hard lesson on how to negotiate these obstacles. Asian elephants also appear to be learning from others how to take down fences or to feed on crops or trash, says behavioral ecologist Shermin de Silva of the University of California, San Diego, who studies them in Sri Lanka.

This can lead to conflict with humans that can have deadly consequences for humans as well as elephants, and the animals that get killed may be the most adaptable and persistent ones, she says, “traits that may be very useful to help them survive in the wild as well.” If the behavior spreads to the next generation, which it could in mothers bringing their offspring to dump sites to feed, young elephants may not learn how to feed on wild plants. “An elephant eats more than 100 different plants,” says de Silva. “But this doesn’t mean they can eat anything anytime. They have to learn.”

Some Asian elephant populations have become so small conservationists might be tempted to give up on them, says de Silva. “But those remnant populations might have local knowledge on how to survive there that is difficult if not impossible to recover if we lose them.” She recently coauthored guidelines on how to reintroduce orphaned elephants to new areas. “It’s important to rear them in a way that discourages them from approaching humans, and to go and learn from other elephants.”

Humans sharing their environment with elephants have historically learned things from them, too. Elephant keepers found out which medicinal plants can help sick elephants by watching what the animals were eating when ill, says de Silva, and some of those plants are now also used by people.

“Elephants probably coevolved with humans, specifically Homo erectus,” says de Silva, “so they’ve always had to deal with us.” As elephant populations recover or, more commonly, new people move into former elephant habitat, some dangerous misunderstandings may occur.

Yet in places where humans and elephants have a long history of living together, there is often a mutual cultural understanding, says de Silva. She emphasizes that does not mean they often interact – people should never feed or approach wild elephants, or accidents will happen. “We need to give them space.”

If elephants are to survive a changing climate in increasingly fragmented landscapes, it will be even more important that the remaining bits of habitat are well-connected to allow them some space to roam, and create areas where old animals can share their inherited knowledge from past challenges, while younger animals feel safe to explore and discover new solutions to novel problems. “Younger individuals might be more adaptable,” says Bates. “And some old habits will need to change.”