How elephants plan journeys: New study reveals energy-saving strategies
How elephants plan journeys: New study reveals energy-saving strategies
University of Oxford
March 26, 2025
See link
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-03-26-how-elephants-plan-journeys-new-study-reveals-energy-saving-strategies
for photo and graphic.
A new study has revealed that African Elephants have an extraordinary
ability to meet their colossal food requirements as efficiently as
possible. Data from over 150 elephants demonstrated that these giants plan
their journeys based on energy costs and resource availability. The
findings – published today in the Journal of Animal Ecology– could provide
crucial information to help protect these iconic animals and their habitats.
Being an elephant is no easy task. As massive herbivores weighing several
tons, they must consume vast amounts of low-calorie vegetation every day.
However, their sheer size means that moving around to find food costs
significant physical effort. Literally every step matters—especially in the
vast, often harsh landscapes they traverse.
Understanding how elephants move through the landscape is essential for
designing effective conservation strategies, particularly as habitat
fragmentation and human activities continue to threaten populations. But up
to now, key drivers behind elephant movements have been unclear.
The new study, led by researchers from the University of Oxford, the German
Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and
Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, used GPS tracking data from 157 African
elephants collected over a 22-year period (1998–2020) in Northern Kenya.
Data was collected by Save the Elephants, a UK-registered, Kenya-based
research and conservation charity.
Key findings:
Elephants strongly prefer landscapes with lower movement costs, with 94% of
the elephants studied avoiding steep slopes and rough terrain. This
suggests they are aware of their surroundings and make cost-benefit
decisions to choose the most energy-efficient paths.
Elephants actively select areas with higher vegetation productivity, with
93% indicating a preference for resource-rich environments.
Water sources play a role in where elephants choose to go, but individual
elephants can respond differently. Some remain close to water sources,
while others roam farther, showing that their movement choices are more
complex than travelling to the nearest river or pond.
Elephants moving at speed show an even stronger avoidance of difficult,
more energetically-costly terrain. 74% of individuals avoided costly areas
when moving slowly, which increased to 87% when moving at intermediate
speeds and to 93% when moving fast. This suggests the animals carefully
balance effort and energy efficiency, especially during long journeys.
According to the researchers, the elephants’ behaviour is comparable to
birds appearing to deliberately use favourable thermal uplifts to reduce
the energetic costs of flying.
To analyse the elephant tracking data the research team employed an
innovative modelling method called ENERSCAPE, which estimates the energy
costs of movement based on body mass and terrain slope. By integrating
these estimates with satellite data on vegetation productivity and water
availability, they built detailed energy landscapes that help explain
elephants' movement decisions.
A statistical approach called step-selection functions was used to assess
how the elephants chose their paths. This technique compares the locations
that elephants actually visited with other nearby areas they could have
chosen but did not. By doing so, the researchers identified which
environmental factors play a role in elephants’ movement decisions and
habitat selection.
These findings have direct applications for wildlife conservation, and
could help guide the design of protected areas and migration corridors to
reduce conflict with humans. The study also suggests that conservation
strategies should account for individual differences in habitat
preferences, particularly concerning water access.
The results could also help predict how elephant movements may respond to
climate change, which affects both the energy costs of moving, and the
availability of food and water.
In the future, the researchers aim to refine energy landscape models by
incorporating additional factors such as seasonal changes, human
disturbances, and the impact of climate change on elephant movements.
Co-author Professor Fritz Vollrath (Department of Biology, University of
Oxford) said: “While more detailed research is needed to fully understand
how an elephant uses its habitat, this study identifies a central
decision-making factor for travelling elephants: save energy whenever
possible.”
Lead researcher Dr Emilio Berti (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity
Research and Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) added: “These new results
have important implications for assessing and planning conservation and
restoration measures, such as dispersal corridors, by explicitly accounting
for the energy costs of moving.”
The study ‘Energy landscapes direct the movement preferences of elephants’
has been published in Journal of Animal Ecology.