African elephants get a little help from their friends

Press, 15 October 1986, Page 21

African elephants get a little help from their friends

By

BARBARA MOFFET,

National

Geographic News Service

To the female elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, family is not everything. When really in need, they also rely on their “bond group” — a sorority of friendly elephants that will come to the rescue at the sound of a bellow.

Elephant families at Amboseli are permanent units of several related females and their offspring; males leave the family when mature. But most families seek outside support by forming alliances with other families. These bond groups may spend as much as 40 per cent of their time together. “What’s so unique about bond groups is that even the animals with the most complex social systems — primates — mainly interact with members of a single social group. Elephants apparently need more,” says Sandy J. Andelman, a research associate at the University of Minnesota, who is studying the elephants. She theorises that the main function of bond groups is as a buddy system to help defend the

vast amounts of food and water needed over the elephants’ long lifetimes. This is the first report of alliance formation in an ungulate species. When bond group members meet, the greeting is demonstrative, to say the least. The elephants might place their trunks in each other’s mouths, and they often sniff each other’s temporal glands, on the side of the forehead. They also will rumble, raise their ears, open their mouths in an exaggerated fashion, and, if really exuberant, spin around in circles, urinating, defecating, and trumpeting. One bond group observed by Dr Andelman goes through this display even after a separation of only half an hour.

Dr Andelman’s study, which is partly supported by the National Geographic Society, is focused on the female elephants of Am-

boseli, a 150-square-mile national park at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in southern Kenya. Her subjects are some of the 670 elephants identified by the naturalist, Cynthia Moss, and her colleagues since 1972.

Sometimes formation of a bond group depends upon the actions of one individual. About 1981, a female called Quilla apparently decided to form such an alliance with the group headed by an elephant known as Delia. Over several years, when Quilla would encounter Delia and her group, she would greet them warmly, as if they were bonded.

Initially, says Dr Andelman, Delia’s group ignored her, but eventually Quills insinuated herself. Now the two families spend nearly half their time together. For many years scientists believed that an elephant’s status

was based on its size. Dr Andelman says that although this is true within family units, the over-all status of a family or bond group depends on different factors. In a conflict between families or bond groups, the dominant group is.the one with the most members and the oldest matriarch. “Even if the matriarch is not present at the time, the rule will hold,” Dr andelman says. “Elephants have very good memories and are very aware of who is related to whom.” The bond group is at its most valuable in confrontations over food, such as a fallen tree, which represents a concentrated mass of energy for elephants. When one elephant confronts another from a different group, the hierarchy takes over.

The dominant elephant may approach, ears folded back, while the subordinate one retreats, often glancing over her shoulder. Or the dominant elephant may actually charge the subordinate, occasionally tusking her and drawing blood. At that

point the subordinate elephant usually runs away, bellowing for help from her bond group. Although the elaborate greeting ritual is generally reserved for bond groups, Dr Andelman reports an exception. Five females have come to know her jeep so well that on the first encounter of the day, they raise their ears, open their mouths, and rumble.

One young elephant known as Zsa Zsa actually incorporated the jeep into her bond group. During the dry season, when food was scarce, she would hear the scientist’s vehicle approaching and run away from her family to join it.

“After greeting my car, she would spend the day following a few metres away, like a dog,” Dr Andelman recalls. The scientist eventually concluded that Zsa Zsa was using the jeep as a buffer; by sticking close to it, she was able to feed uninterrupted by other elephants. As expected, when the rains finally came, bringing more abundant food, Zsa Zsa lost interest in cars.