How wild elephants solve puzzles may help humans resolve wildlife conflicts
How wild elephants solve puzzles may help humans resolve wildlife conflicts
Malavika Vyawahare, Mongabay
October 31, 2023
See link
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/10/how-wild-elephants-solve-puzzles-may-help-humans-resolve-wildlife-conflicts/for
photos.
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
pounds), 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
behaviors.
“In other species that have been tested for innovation, bigger brains have
been correlated with more innovation,” said 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.”
To find out if more gray 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.
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 favorite snack.
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 recently 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.
The team first piloted the experiment at a zoo in the U.S., 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 said,
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,” said 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 said 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 learned 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.
Jacobson’s adviser at CUNY 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 said, which might tell researchers more about herds
and individual members that are more likely to come in contact with
neighboring 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 neighbors 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 said. “If we know
something about ‘problem individuals’ who are learning and spreading
problematic behaviors, such as crop raiding, we may be able to design
targeted intervention efforts that mitigate human-elephant conflict.”