Elephants, lions, and social learning
When it comes to learning about dangers in their environment, elephants may learn from their elders
Although they are the biggest animals in the savannah, elephants still have to watch their backs.
Lions will, if given the right circumstances, attack elephants. Particularly during the dry season, when water is concentrated in a few spots, and elephants are forced to travel, sometimes large distances, to reach the water. During these marathons, young elephants, in particular, become particularly vulnerable, something which lions can take advantage of.
Male lions, in particular, are more dangerous to elephants, thanks to their larger size than females. Similarly, large prides are more likely to be able to hunt elephants by combining the strength of several lions.
However, elephants are, relatively speaking, an infrequent prey of lions, and as such, it isn’t easy to tell if elephants consider lions a real threat or not.
Not an easy prey
Elephants are far from vulnerable. Besides their tusks and large body size, many elephants have a herd to protect them. The protection the herd offers comes not only from the safety in bigger numbers, but also, from the knowledge the other herd members have.
More elephants means more eyes looking out for dangers, ears capable of listening to a lion’s roar, and trunks capable of smelling if there are predators around.
Plus, the older an individual is, the more likely they are to have more experience with particular sounds or smells. The herd relies on the knowledge of older, more experienced females to guide and protect them.
Sometimes, that means chasing away the danger before it becomes one!
Assessing the elephants’ response to lions
To study elephants’ potential “threat assessment” of lions, scientists have used a couple of different methods.
There is a new lion in town
One way of telling if elephants consider lions a threat is the reintroduction of predators into areas where elephants are established. We may expect no change in elephant behaviour if lions are not considered a dangerous threat, and some change if they are.
The reintroduction of lions (and spotted hyenas) in Addo National Park (South Africa) presented a great opportunity to see how prey animals responded. Elephants, like the rest of the animals studied, became more diurnal after lions, an animal that is more active at night, were reintroduced. While elephants had the smallest change out of all the other species, they still experienced a change in behaviour, indicating some temporal distancing from the potentially dangerous lions.
The Scientists Who Cried Lion
Another way to study their response is to see how elephants behave when they hear lions roaring. Researchers broadcasted lion roars of single and grouped male and female lions and studied the elephants’ responses.
They found that older matriarchs were better at distinguishing the threat the roars represented. When older females heard the roar of several lions, and when they heard male lions, they grouped up protectively and spent more time listening compared to single roars, and roars of female lions.
The researchers propose that the older females in Amboseli National Park (Kenya) required their life-long learning to improve their assessment of dangers and know what to listen for in a lion’s roar.
Recent research took the opportunity to study where this knowledge may come from. The researchers studied two elephant populations: a stable one and one created many years ago through the reintroduction of orphaned, unrelated elephants.
The elephants that had had a traumatising past were not able to appropriately assess the danger differences between the roar of a single lion and several. They did react to the lions’ roars, but they did so in the same manner, potentially wasting a lot of energy by reacting to lions that likely pose no dangers to them.
In contrast, elephants from stable families showed an ability to tell the greater danger in the group lion call. Those elephants displayed defensive behaviours (such as tightening their group, sticking together etc), particularly when large groups of lions were roaring, but their behaviours were minimal when only a single lion roared.
In an article he wrote for The Conversation, one of the studies’ authors, Graeme Shannon, said the following about their results:
Our results have important implications for the remaining elephant populations across Africa, many of which face considerable pressure from humans, such as poaching, habitat loss and climate change. These threats greatly impact social structure and the opportunity to learn crucial skills from older and more experienced individuals.
Sadly it is often these older and wiser animals that are the target of illegal hunting due to their larger tusks. Ultimately, when it comes to conserving long-lived and highly social species such as elephants, we need to protect the social structure of the population.
