Sixteen of 81 calves born in the park that year died in a nine-month period, a 20 percent mortality rate, much higher than the typical 2 percent; 10 of the dead were from the group that remained in the park, where feed and water were scarce.
Researchers concluded that the older elephants recalled a drought in the park that lasted from 1958 to 1961, and how their packs survived the slim pickings by migrating to lusher areas a distance away. None of the elephants that stayed behind were old enough to remember the previous dry spell.
Elephants also apparently recognize and can keep track of the locations of as many as 30 companions at a time, psychologist Richard Byrne of the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland and other researchers discovered during a 2007 study at Amboseli.
"Imagine taking your family to a crowded department store and the Christmas sales are on," Byrne says. "What a job to keep track of where four or five family members are. These elephants are doing it with 30 traveling-mates."
The scientists tested this memory by placing urine samples in front of female elephants, who thoroughly checked them with their trunks and acted up when they came across one that did not come from a member of their brood, and thereby should not have been there. "Most animals that hang around in packs, such as deer, probably have no idea who the other animals in their pack are," Byrne says. But elephants "almost certainly know every [member] in their group."
Such "working memory" is "far in advance of anything other animals have been shown to have," Byrne adds, and helps the elephant monitor the family units that move, forage and socialize together.
When it comes to smarts, elephants are right up there with dolphins, apes and humans, says WCS cognitive scientist Diana Reiss and colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta. They reported in 2006 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that elephants, like the other mammals in that exclusive circle, are the only animals known to recognize their reflections in a mirror.
Zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants in Nairobi, Kenya, is an authority on pachyderms who has studied them since the 1960s. He recounts becoming so well acquainted with an elephant in Tanzania's Lake Manyara National Park early in his career that he could actually walk beside her in the wild. He left the area in 1969 to write his thesis and did not return again for four years. But when he came back, he says, it was as though he'd never left. "She came right back up to me and behaved the same way," he says, noting that they resumed their friendly strolls.
"They're long-lived animals, and memory would be a benefit to a long-lived animal, making it more adaptive to circumstances," Douglas-Hamilton says. "Clearly if elephants experience extremes of climate and they can remember where the food is during a year, they can survive."
So the next time someone says you have a memory like an elephant, take it as a compliment.
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3 Comments
Add Commentha.. its funny because smells are so strongly linked to memories.. and elephants are definatly champs of the big nose world
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps a greater long term risk (slightly off subject) is the criteria which are used to breed vegetables, fruit etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese are appearance (size, color(s), smoothness etc.),
shelf life
production efficiencies (abilities to utilize large amounts of energy inefficiently synthesized fertilizers, selective pesticides and herbicides, requirements for mechanical soil adjustments, transport, milling etc)
Present day agricultural techniques primarily convert fossil fuel energy into food energy at shockingly low (even negative!) efficiencies.
We presently measure efficiencies against currency terms which are perceived rather than real.
Preserve the gene pool and nutrients (and health and taste) by educating young people under the moniker and key words "Your Body and Sex" and inform them about food, the food industry, sales techniques, dis-ease, drugs etc with much reference to SEX! Keep them interested!
At the moment (especially in the USA) this is (almost?) illegal!
sorry this was intended to go with the vegetable nutrient discussion
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