Keeping tabs on your friends and relations isn’t easy if you’re an elephant: they don’t have mobile phones and they don’t tend to let you know what they’re doing on Facebook. So elephants keep track of their family members by smelling their urine.
A study published in Biology Letters shows that African elephants can recognize up to 17 females and possibly up to 30 family members from cues present in the urine–earth mix. They can even keep track of where these individuals are in relation to themselves (study).
The researchers presented elephants with urine samples from non-family members, family members who were close by and family members who were some way behind the pachyderms in question. In the first case the lead elephant of a herd wasn’t really bothered. In the second they evinced some interest. In the third they were positively intrigued.
“The cliche is that elephants have big memories and we wanted to find out what they used them for. They are keeping track of their family members,” says researcher Lucy Bates of the University of St Andrews in Scotland (Telegraph).
Fellow researcher Richard Byrne told the BBC, “If 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.”
Keeping track of even one elephant is proving problematic for humans in Nepal though. And this is the largest of its kind.
Raja Gaj, ‘king elephant’, was about 3.5 meters tall at the shoulder, significantly larger than your average Asian elephant. However he hasn’t been seen for a year at the Bardia National Park (Reuters). He may even have been killed by poachers, said Phanindra Kharel, the park’s chief conservation officer (Japan Today).
At least he didn’t have herpes, unlike elephants in Missouri and Seattle. According to animal rights group In Defense of Animals says beasts in Springfield, Missouri are living in an elephant herpes hotspot (press release 1). The group also wants Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to stop breeding elephants after a death from the virus earlier this year (IDA press release, zoo press release).
Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield says “radical animal extremists are making wildly unsubstantiated claims” (press release, via KSPR).
“We as zoo professionals prefer to rely on sound research conducted by scientists with the greatest expertise,” notes Mike Keele, Deputy Director of Oregon Zoo and Elephant Species Survival Plan coordinator. “Suppositions made by detractors are based on their anti-zoo agenda, not on substantive research. Learning as much as we can about the elephants in our care is at the top of our agenda.”
He has something of a point – IDA seems to be against all elephants in zoos, which is something of a conflict of interest when you’re talking about the morals of breeding them in a specific case.
News coverage in the Seattle Times, KSPR, and Seattle PI.
Image: Getty