Elephant personalities revealed by scientists

Source: Earth Heal – News For An Earth In Transition

Elephant personalities revealed by scientists

(The Telegraph) – Elephants have four distinct personalities that help their herd survive in the African bush, scientists have found.

African elephant and calf: Researchers found that some elephants had more gentle personalities
Researchers found that some elephants had more gentle personalities Photo: Burrard-Lucas / Barcroft Media

With their grey skin, mournful eyes and slow plodding gait, you could be forgiven for thinking elephants are uniformly melancholy creatures.

But scientists have now discovered the largest living land animals have personalities to match their size.

In a new study of African elephants, researchers have identified four distinct characters that are prevalent with a herd – the leaders, the gentle giants, the playful rogues and the reliable plodders.

Each of the types has developed to help the giant mammals survive in their harsh environment and are almost unique in the animal kingdom, according to the scientists.

“Each individual in a group has a very different personality type,” said Professor Phyllis Lee, a behavioural psychologist at University of Stirling and chair of the scientific advisory committee for the Amboseli Trust for Elephants.

“We found that these personalities have a key role in how successful the family is and how they cope with threats and adversity like starvation or drought.

“It is the ability to influence others and sustain friendships are important to an elephant group, while in other animals it is often aggression or dominance.”

Professor Lee and her colleague Cynthia Moss studied a herd of elephants in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya known as the EB family – famous for their matriarch Echo before she died in 2009.

Using data collected over 38 years of watching this group, the researchers analysed them for 26 types of behaviour and found four personality traits tended to come to the fore.

The strongest personality to emerge was that of the leader. The researchers, whose work is published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, looked for those elephants that tended to influence the movements and direction of the group.

They also looked for the elephants that produced the most deep calls known as “let’s go” rumbles, which the animals use when started to move as a herd.Unlike other animals, where leadership tends to be won by the most dominant and aggressive individual, the elephants instead respected intelligence and problem solving in their leader.

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