Opening doors may not seem that hard, but when you have a trunk instead of hands, things can get complicated. Researchers tested the problem-solving skills of wild elephants for the first time by tasking the jumbos with doing just that.
Elephants are brainy. An adult elephant’s brain weighs 5 kilograms (11 lbs), the largest of any terrestrial animal (and three times the size of the human brain). From living in complex social groups mourning their dead to finding elusive water sources, pachyderms display a range of intelligent behaviours.
“In other species that have been tested for innovation, bigger brains have been correlated with more innovation,” says Sarah Jacobson at the City University of New York’s Comparative Cognition for Conservation Lab. “We wanted to come up with a way to measure this in wild elephants.”
Puzzle solving
They came up with a contraption with three small compartments that had doors that opened in three different ways: push, pull, and slide. Inside each nook lay a morsel of juicy jackfruit, their favourite snack.
To find out if more grey matter actually translates to better problem-solving skills, Jacobson and her team designed an experiment engaging Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at Thailand’s Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary in an open-air puzzle.
Five of the 44 elephants that engaged with the box managed to open all three doors. Eight managed to open two, and another 11 opened just one. The number of doors they opened captured their ability to innovate under the experiment, with the findings published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
The five who scored all doors were older males. It wasn’t clear from the data what role gender played in their success. What the results did show was that persistence paid off. The more time an elephant spent interacting with the puzzle, the higher its chances of success. Trying different actions also yielded rewards.
Captive or wild? Is there a difference?
The team first piloted the experiment at a zoo in the US, where more than 60% of the jumbo participants opened all three doors (eight out of 14). Jacobson attributed their better performance to their environment and experience. “All of their food and needs are taken care of,” she says, adding that captive elephants have “fewer distractions” compared to their wild cousins.
Zoo-housed elephants are also exposed to a more interactive environment: zookeepers like to keep things interesting for their wards, which is helpful when facing another human-concocted challenge.
“It is important to study the cognition of elephants given how intelligent and endangered they are,” says Lisa P. Barrett, an expert in animal cognition at Indiana University Bloomington, who was not involved with the study. “We may learn how to help conserve Asian elephants, for example, by better understanding how they approach and solve a novel problem.”
Jacobson says that with growing pressures on elephant habitats, jumbos faced a changing environment and novel challenges. However, the cleverness of elephants can be tricky for the people who share space with them. For one thing, smart elephants will find ways around the barriers that communities put up to protect life, livestock and property.
In Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, for instance, electric fences haven’t been able to deter tuskers. Elephants there quickly learnt that their tusks didn’t conduct electricity. Soon, they started using them to manipulate and break through the barriers. In one video uploaded by researchers at Lewa, an African elephant can be seen holding the wires up with its tusks, allowing another to pass beneath.
Such ingenious displays may make for compelling viewing on social media, but on the ground, it can signal trouble to come.
Human-elephant conflict
Jacobson’s adviser at City University of New York recommended Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary for her study because of the intensity of human-elephant conflicts there. People living around the sanctuary have tried everything from firecrackers to electric barriers to beehives to keep elephants out. The current study focused on elephants living deep within the reserve.
“We are planning to test this on elephants living on the edges of the sanctuary,” Jacobson says, which might tell researchers more about herds and individual members that are more likely to come in contact with neighbouring communities.
When trying to soothe conflicts between the two species — humans and elephants — paying attention to the latter helps. That means studying all aspects of elephant intelligence: how they perceive and navigate the world.
It might be possible to eventually create profiles of individual elephants. These may be useful in cases where some particularly feisty and artful individuals cause a lot of damage. It can allow people to come up with better ways to prevent harm from their wild neighbours at large. For example, if the concerned elephant is timid, loud noises may be enough to repel it rather than expensive fencing.
While this appears to punish the more enterprising elephants, reducing dangerous interactions can, in fact, promote their welfare.
“Jacobson and colleagues showed that there is individual variation in problem-solving ability of wild elephants,” Barrett says. “If we know something about ‘problem individuals’ who are learning and spreading problematic behaviours, such as crop raiding, we may be able to design targeted intervention efforts that mitigate human-elephant conflict.”
Republished from Mongabay under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article with citations here.
