A HERD of around 40 elephants processes across open grassland in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. Led by a matriarch named Valente, they are headed towards a newly felled tree, a potential food source. The tree is out of sight: perhaps the elephants detected vibrations from the impact through their feet. That’s cool, and the procession is impressive – but elephant scientist Joyce Poole isn’t sure why . Since May, she and her husband Petter Granli have been posting clips of elephants daily on social media, and others are far cuter or odder.
The duo are co-founders of a US-based non-profit organisation called , and these videos are part of a project they have been working on for the past five years. Called the , it is a freely available online library of elephant behaviours and vocalisations, along with their meanings. Since it went live, Poole and Granli have been inundated with messages expressing wonder and gratitude.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The human desire to decipher other animals is ancient, and science has recently brought that dream closer – through, for example, the use of artificial intelligence to start decoding the vocalisations of whales and birds. The Elephant Ethogram is less flashy, but far more impressive. Andrew Whiten, who studies animal behaviour at the University of St Andrews, UK, calls it a “staggering achievement”. It is probably the most ambitious ethogram ever created. As well as giving anyone the pleasure of understanding elephants more intimately, it could transform the way researchers see these magnificent animals – and even help avert their extinction.
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You can think of an ethogram as a foreign-language dictionary for an entire species that covers actions as well as sounds. The concept dates back to the mid-20th century, when pioneering ethologists like Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz drew up the first ones for species whose behaviour they thought of as innate and stereotypical – mainly insects, birds and fish. , that staple of laboratory research. But intelligent, socially complex animals represent a much greater challenge, and you can count the number of ethograms that cover them on the fingers of one hand. For cetaceans, there is a book called . For chimpanzees, says Whiten, the most comprehensive one is probably another book called . And now there is the Elephant Ethogram.
This new lexicon is in a different league. It is the first online database for a big-brained animal – a format that lends itself easily to updating, which is useful if you are interested in behavioural change – and it is searchable. It contains 425 behaviours, illustrated with some 3000 annotated video clips, audio recordings and photographs, and draws on scientific papers dating back more than a century. Despite its unprecedented detail and scope, it is very much a work in progress. Poole and Granli hope that other scientists will contribute to it as time goes on. For now, though, it only covers African savannah elephants from Gorongosa and two other sites – Kenya’s Maasai Mara ecosystem and Amboseli National Park.
Human-like behaviour
Already, to plunge into the ethogram is to discover the astonishing range and flexibility of elephant behaviour. You soon realise that context matters, with the same behaviour meaning different things in different settings. Take tail swatting. When forcefully applied, it often means “keep your distance”, whereas from a mother to her calf, it says: “Are you there baby?” It can even , says Poole, pointing to the example of Qaskasi, a young female in Amboseli. Adolescent female elephants play an important role in helping to care for the young of older females, but their efforts aren’t always welcome. Videos show the matriarch Qoral repeatedly pushing Qaskasi away from her newborn. Then, after the hapless Qaskasi has fallen on the calf, she tries to make amends by gently tail swatting a ruffled Qoral.
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You may think this story has echoes of human behaviour, and it isn’t the only one. In another clip, a male named Icarus approaches his human observers . This behaviour, called a , is typical of males in musth, when they have a heightened sex drive. Like Icarus, they are essentially strutting their stuff in front of potential mates. Those aren’t Poole’s words, but she isn’t afraid of anthropomorphising. “To me, it’s not a dirty word,” she says. “Elephants are mammals like us – it’s not surprising that we have certain behaviours in common.” It is now accepted, for instance, that they can grieve over the loss of a relative, and express joy on the birth of a calf. Comparison with human behaviour can be useful for conveying succinctly what the elephants are doing, too, as in the case of , a greeting (though it is more besides) that involves them raising and intertwining their trunks.
“This information could prove invaluable for rewilding efforts”
If Poole feels confident that she understands most of the behaviours in the ethogram, more or less, it is because she and others have seen them crop up repeatedly in similar situations – the fruit of long hours of observation in the field (see “Watching you, watching me“). “The attention to detail in Joyce and Petter’s work is amazing,” says , UK, who studies elephant cognition. “The tiniest, subtlest movements that are so easy to miss have been highlighted and described, which could save huge amounts of time and effort for people just learning about elephant behaviour.” For her, however, the most exciting prospect is that researchers will be able to take a given behaviour in the ethogram and look for it in the population they study. “It can generate a lot more data to help us understand why elephants do certain things,” she says. , for example, was once thought to be a form of sniffing, but is now considered both that and a signal with multiple meanings. In a procession, it might serve to point towards the collective destination, while an infant doing it in its mother’s presence is probably asking to suckle. In sparring males, it means: “I’m ready, what’s your next move?”
There are a few behaviours in the database that Poole admits still puzzle her. One is , where young females straddle a certain kind of shrub, the croton bush, and “go all doe-eyed”, as Poole puts it. She wonders if they are rehearsing for motherhood: “That was my thought when I saw it, but I don’t know,” she says.
Stand-over-bush has only been observed in the Maasai Mara elephants so far, so it could be an example of a behaviour that emerged and spread in one population and not in others. There is strong evidence for such distinct cultural practices in cetaceans and apes – for example, in the songs of whales and the use of tools by chimps – but evidence of culture in elephants is sketchier. “We still don’t really know if all behaviour is universal in [savannah] elephants or if there are differences in who does what, where, when and why,” says Bates.
A cultured animal
The case for elephant culture is building, though. At Tsavo East National Park in Kenya, semi-captive elephants have been recorded . At Gorongosa, where 90 per cent of elephants were slaughtered when civil war raged in Mozambique between 1977 and 1992, the remaining elephants learned to be aggressive – and remain so today. “They’ve passed it on to their offspring now,” says Poole. “Furthermore, each family has its own traditions for attacking.” Some charge as a group, while in others only the matriarch sallies forth. Not for nothing did two Gorongosa females earn the names and . The elephants that live in Amboseli, which are used to tourists, are far less aggressive.
“Capturing behaviour in an ethogram helps us spot cultural diversity,” says Whiten. The that behavioural and cultural diversity is widespread in the animal kingdom doesn’t seem to sit well with the original idea of an ethogram as an exhaustive and definitive lexicon of innate and stereotypical behaviours. Yet they can be invaluable for that very reason, he says. “We tend to think of culture as varying over space, but it varies over time too.” An ethogram can capture both dimensions.
As researchers begin to map out a species’ cultural range, they can also probe the frontier between normal diversity and abnormal behaviour or sickness. For example, Poole describes the behaviour of a young male she observed manipulating a twig between his armpit and his nipple as “idiosyncratic”. But the repeated tugging on the nipple that has been reported in some captive elephants is aberrant because, along with other repetitive, apparently pointless actions, it is only seen in captivity, she says. Knowing what is abnormal obviously has welfare implications. Captive elephants often lack space in which to forage and other elephants to interact with, and their behaviour is impoverished as a result. Most zoos and circuses are now at least aware of the need to enrich animals’ environments – that is, provide them with psychological and physical stimulation comparable to what they would receive in the wild. Understanding the subtleties of their behaviour can help with this.
Such knowledge is also crucial for captive breeding programmes. There have been successful attempts to teach captive-born animals the skills they need to survive in the wild before they are returned there. For example, golden lion tamarins experienced high casualties when they were first released in the early 1980s after a captive breeding programme brought them back from the brink of extinction. But they did better after they were given temporary . Now that plans are afoot to , Poole hopes the same approach can be applied to them.
But influencing the behaviour of an intelligent, cultured animal can be challenging. , at UK-based charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation, points to an , including seals and dolphins, and starved to death in captivity rather than switch to fish. Yet orcas must change their behaviour sometimes because populations around the world have some unique foraging traditions, she says. Once an individual has innovated, there is probably a host of factors that determine whether others follow suit to create a new culture. These factors may vary for different animal species, too. “We don’t yet understand enough about how these behaviours are transmitted in the wild,” says Brakes.
As the Elephant Ethogram expands, the information it contains could prove invaluable for rewilding efforts. Indeed, conservation could be the driving force behind a new vogue for ethograms in general. Knowing that older female elephants are the repositories of learning in a family, or that whales transmit information about foraging grounds across generations, is essential to understanding where a depleted population’s vulnerabilities lie – and hence how to protect it. But to actually apply such knowledge, you have to understand how cultural practices vary across a species. That’s why, since 2014, the United Nations has backed a movement to . Brakes, who chairs a UN expert group on animal culture, says she looks forward to the day when ethograms exist for all the vertebrate groups that we know learn socially, everything from birds to whales to lizards. “We need to adjust the way we draw lines around populations, factoring in not just geographic distribution and genetic diversity, but also culture,” she says.
The urgent need to do this for elephants – which are endangered the world over – is what prompted Poole and Granli to devote years to building the Elephant Ethogram. But they also want to raise public awareness of the plight faced by these majestic and intriguing animals, they say. “We hope it will remind people what will be lost if we don’t change course.”
Watching you, watching me
One of the sacred tenets of the study of animals is to try to influence the behaviour under observation as little as possible. This becomes difficult when a behaviour is itself an adaptation to humans. Joyce Poole, co-founder of ElephantVoices, has found herself in the surreal situation of listening in as elephants discuss what to do about the humans in the vicinity. “We may be monitoring them with drones, planes and satellite collars, but they’re monitoring us 24/7 too,” she says.
Poole has seen elephants gather at the boundary of a conservancy of an evening, in preparation for a raid or to reach a habitat beyond neighbouring human settlements. Family members deploy the , but the matriarch, listening to the receding human voices and cattle bells, refuses to be rushed. “They’re saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go’, but she’s waiting, listening and sniffing,” says Poole. “Then she decides it’s safe to go, and they move in a tight bunch – I call it a ‘group march’ – leaving the conservancy because they know that people are going to bed, it’s getting dark and they can head outside.”
Elephants are intelligent enough to make that kind of call, in other words. But they may not be intelligent enough to predict the potentially dire consequences for themselves of a clash with humans. And there’s the rub. Their best hope of survival might be for us to use our understanding of elephants to teach them how to resist us better. Poole is working on that by .
