#elephant behavior

Imagine the biggest animal on land. They also have the biggest ears of any land animal, which, because they don’t sweat, they use for cooling like a stereo fan. They have four legs (technically two arms and two legs, with wrists and elbows), like a cow or a horse, but they don’t have hooves; instead, they have 5 toes on each leg just like we do (the white bumps you see are toenails; they have five on the front foot and four on the back); they can pick up subsonic vibrations from 20 miles away with their feet, which also have shock absorbers that allow them to walk almost silently. They have this appendage on their face, a trunk, that is a combination of an arm and a nose; it doesn’t have bones, but instead has 40,000 muscles (the human body has fewer than 850), with which they can pick up an egg without breaking or carry a tree weighing as much as 700 pounds. They also drink out of their trunk, sucking up water partway through their nose and then squirting it in their mouth like a straw. Some of them even have 2 huge front teeth that are big enough to break off tree bark or even salt crystals (as they are herbivores, so need to supplement their vegetable diet with salt). 

There really is no extant animal like the elephant, which fascinated Europeans at least as far back as the ancient Roman aristocrat Pliny the Elder, who called them “the closest of all animals to humans in intelligence. It understands the language of its own country, and therefore understands and obeys orders. Elephants are wise and just, remember their duties, enjoy affection, and respect religion.” (1st century AD, Natural History, Book 8) And while Pliny is somewhat overstating their nobility (elephants are very emotional and territorial, particularly with food or offspring, and aren’t above yelling/hitting calves for misbehaving, and when it comes to other elephants or even humans they see as a threat all bets are off; there’s a reason why they kill more humans than any other animal in captivity) he is right that they can discern human language (when elephants Mari and Vaigai were given to the Honolulu Zoo by Indian PM Indira Gandhi, they had to learn English to be able to understand their new keepers), are extremely affectionate (their version of a hug is sticking their trunk into each other’s mouths), and it’s theorized that their burial rituals are a protoreligious behavior (they are pretty selective with the bones they bury; usually just large herbivores like themselves and cows and rhinos, or humans, with whom they have a working bond that goes back millennia).

I think elephants strike a great balance between the intelligence of gorillas and octopuses in that they are different enough from us we have to reconsider our human biases in communicating with them, but they aren’t so different that they’re operating on a level we can’t comprehend. My favorite instance of this was the experiment with problem solving involving Kandula, a 7-year-old calf from Washington DC. Previous experiments with problem solving were whether an elephant could reach food hung from a wire with a stick like apes could; but what the scientists didn’t factor in is that having an arm that’s also a nose meant they couldn’t smell the food, and so failed the test. It wasn’t until they started putting boxes or balls around the exhibit that Kandula was able to roll them under the food, use the block as a stool, and then reach for it with his trunk. Designing experiments with elephants in mind also showed they could cooperate with each other, by pulling a crate of bananas with a rope, and could even recognize themselves in a mirror. Similarly, like giraffes they can “talk” to each other with sounds often too low for humans to hear, which was only found out by accident in the 1990s.

Elephants are highly emotional, likely due to an enlarged amygdala; I rarely see them express any indifference. If they love you, they will greet you in the morning, give you hugs, and remember you forever. If they hate you, they will try to hurt you, sometimes without any provocation (I spoke to an assistant keeper that had an elephant try to charge him because of the hat he was wearing) or just to prove themselves (young Asian male elephants, who are going through their first musth hormonal cycle, are notorious for this). Due to musth cycle, male elephants have to leave their natal herd because they become too aggressive; he joins a bachelor herd, but elephants are unique in that he will occasionally visit his natal herd (other social species, like cheetahs horses or lions, view a male coming back as a sign of aggression). The bond between a calf and their mother is unbreakable, as shown when a mother and daughter elephant had a celebratory reunion in a Thai sanctuary after 4 years apart. It was through an emotional greeting ritual were we finally able to prove that “elephants never forget“, when two elephants were reunited after 20 years apart in 1999. (Really, I could‘ve just answered your question with “Shirley” and it might’ve been an adequate answer. Shirley passed away February of this year at age 72.5 and I’m still heartbroken over this patient but firm, determined allomother).

So you could say I’m fascinated by elephants not only for their unique physical characteristics, but their unique intelligence that makes us challenge our own ideas, and how their strong emotions show their great capacity for love, but also that they’re wild animals to be respected and admired from a distance.

The Secret Language of Elephants

Did you know elephants can communicate over miles? Discover their fascinating infrasound and its implications!

If you’ve spent ever a little time around parts of the internet that deal with elephant advocacy, you’ve probably seen the stock photo above: liquid clearly running out of the inner corner of an elephant’s eye, looking for all the world like crying. It’s pretty much the go-to image for pieces about emotional complexity in elephants, and is generally used to represent the fact that people think they can cry tears of emotion. Except if you’ve spent any time at a zoo or around people who work with elephants, they’ll tell you elephants can’t cry because they don’t have the right physical structures. So what gives? The answer turns out to be, effectively, that going semi-aquatic for a while in your evolutionary history fucks up a perfectly good tear-producing system, and that effective science messaging is really hard. So. Uh. I went down a rabbit hole and spent two weeks researching how elephant eyeballs keep themselves wet. It’s actually pretty fascinating science, but since the above article I wrote is pretty technical, here’s a more casual rundown. 

Humans (and most mammals) produce most of our tear fluid from a big gland under the outer part of our eyebrows. It drains onto the eye, spreads across it when we blink, and normally just drains away into our nasal cavity through those tiny holes in the inner corners of our eyes. If our eyes get irritated, we produce more liquid to flush out whatever is in them; if we’re in an emotional state, the “calm yourself back down” part of the fight-or-flight reflex system makes the gland overproduce liquid that’s full of hormones and painkillers and stuff. In the latter case, the drainage canals in our eyes get overwhelmed by the amount of liquid produced, and you get the whole tears spilling out of your eyes thing. 

Tear fluid isn’t just liquid in your eyes - it’s actually a pretty complicated three-layer setup. Each layer is produced by a different type of gland and has a different purpose: mucous helps make sure tears spread evenly, then you’ve got the actual aqueous stuff which is anti-bacterial, and then oil on top of the watery stuff keeps the liquid from evaporating or falling out of your eyes all the time.

Probably during the period of time when it’s thought  the ancestors of elephants were semi-aquatic, they basically threw that entire system out of the window. Having a modified lacrimal apparatus (the set of glands and canals that are involved in tear production) appears to be a fairly normal thing for semi-aquatic mammals: modern pinnipeds don’t have an oil layer on their tear film, because when you’re underwater a lot you don’t need to worry about your eyeball lubrication evaporating. (This is why pinnipeds, when on land, appear to always be crying - there’s no lipid barrier creating surface tension and keeping the fluid on the eye.) Except...  the ancestors of elephants got rid of the whole water-based tear-producing system, not just the lipid layers. Including the drainage system at the corners of their eyes. And then, eventually, evolved to be terrestrial again. 

So, in absence of the normal glandular system for lubricating their eyes, elephants... appear to have basically hijacked a bunch of the glands they did have left (one on the third eyelid, as well as ones external to the eye that normally lubricate the eyelashes) and started using them to keep their eyes moist. Because these are modified skin glands, they produce really weird fluid - lovely combinations of watery liquid and mucous and sebum. But, because elephants no longer have those drainage systems for tear fluid, it doesn’t have anywhere to go; their watery eyeball goop builds up and then spills out of their eyes at the inner corner. There’s actually a specific groove in the skin that moves it diagonally away from the eye in both species, which is why the spilled fluid tends to look like “tear tracks” rather than just a wet mess near the eye. 

TL;DR: when it looks like an elephant is crying, that’s just the regular eyeball moisture draining out visibly because they don’t have canals to carry it into the nasal passages like most mammals. 

Here’s some other fun stuff about eyeballs and elephants and crying that made the above overview a bit overwhelming when I tried to include them in paragraph form: 

Without a lacrimal apparatus, elephants can’t produce emotional tears - the glands that normally get a message from the brain that says ‘hey you should produce sad tears now’ are just straight up non-existent. 

The white stuff that accumulates at the corners of their eyes is likely to be the mucous and sebum from the tear fluid that hasn’t evaporated; there’s no academic literature addressing it, but it occurs more on windy days when their eyes would be producing more tear film to remove irritants,and  the elephant care staff I’ve talked to said it’s considered to be a normal occurrence. 

The drainage from glands on the side of an elephant’s head is also not crying! It’s fluid seeping from a modified sweat gland, which (in African elephants) is actually triggered by the other end of the fight-or-flight system from crying; they start draining from their temporal glands during periods of high internal arousal, but it’s the “okay time to get amped” sympathetic nervous system that makes it happen - crying is a parasympathetic nervous system response that serves to help humans calm back down after a stressor. 

Asian elephants don’t actually generally from their temporal glands during strong emotion! Females rarely, if ever, produce fluid from them, and males generally only have discharge present fro them when they’re in musth. 

We don’t actually know a lot about the purpose of the temporal glands in elephants. It’s hypothesized that the secretions from them are some sort of chemical communication, but more research is needed. 

EDIT: tear duct appears to be a colloquial term that is used to reference both the little tubes between the gland that creates tears and the surface of your eye, and the duct that drains tears into the nasal cavity of both mammals. This is part of the confusion around the term. Either way, saying “elephants don’t have tear ducts” is an interesting way of phrasing things, because what’s more important is that they also don’t have the gland that creates tears. 

One of the things that consistently surprises me about elephants behavior is how incredibly intense their interactions are with each other. For animals that Western culture tends to portray as “gentle giants,” elephant social interactions are very physical and often quite rough. 

This video from the Elephant Listening Project is a great example of that physicality. (It was only uploaded on FB, so you’ll have to click-through to the project’s page to view it). This is a contest between two adult males over breeding access to females in the area, and as you can see, they’re not gentle with each other. It’s incredible to see such huge animals - who you’d think would move slowly and need to be careful - having such contests of strength. Babies and juvenile elephants practice sparring and wrestling with each other frequently to prepare them for situations like this when they reach adulthood. 

While many people think of a circus act when they think of an elephant balancing on two legs, it’s actually a fairly common behavior among wild elephants! They’ve been observed standing up on their back legs while foraging -   it’s a pretty useful technique for getting branches that are just out of trunk-range. The full-grown, adult male African elephant in this video holds a two-legged stand, repeatedly, for 5+ seconds at a time; he’s well enough balanced that it looks totally possible that he could have held it for longer. 

Here’s another video of the same behavior - this time by a juvenile elephant - filmed outside a safari camp.

(Gif made from this video at Khao Yai National Park.)

While looking for video clips for last week’s post about standing on two legs being a completely normal behavior for elephants, I also came across another one worth talking about - headstands! 

Contrary to the common assumption that “elephants don’t stand on their heads in the wild,” well... to a degree, they actually do! It’s fairly common for wild elephants to be observed getting down on their front ankles and putting a large amount of their weight and balance onto their heads. Calves are the most frequently seen doing the behavior, since through play they practice the skills they’ll need as adults. It takes them a while to figure out how to balance and what on earth to do with their trunks, but that doesn’t discourage them - people who have observed elephants professionally both in the wild and in human care tell me that it’s not unusual to see calves launching themselves with gusto face-first into whatever soft surface is nearby. 

(Image from this video in Kruger National Park)

The “headstand” posture is used in a couple of different situations, and doesn’t appear to have an “official” name - every elephant person I’ve talked to tends to refer to it by the role it plays in the situation in which it occurs. So sometimes it’s “tusking” (when it relates to digging into the ground, specifically as part of play or a threat behavior), but sometimes it’s a “head press,” and sometimes it’s a “headstand.”

What do elephants use this “headstand” behavior for? 

Wallowing in the mud! 

(Image from this video at the Birmingham Zoo)

Pushing or squishing large or heavy objects! 

(Images from this video at the Oregon Zoo)

And...  oh yeah... killing things. 

This is actually how I was originally introduced to elephants doing “head stands” as part of their normal behavioral repertoire - and it’s gruesome. If an elephant wants to hurt you, it can do a number of things: step on you, trunk swat you, gore you... or squish you with their face. By doing a headstand onto you. Elephants have incredibly dense skulls that can bear a lot of strain, so if they really want you (or a lion) dead, they kneel down, rest their forehead on you, and then proceed to lean their entire body weight forward onto you. 

While “head pressing” is a common way elephants kill - I’ve had multiple AZA elephant keepers as well as people involved in wild elephant conservation confirm it - it’s not something I was able to find a video of on youtube, and that’s probably for the best. The only record I could find of a human death from elephant head pressing was a zookeeper in the 80′s, but I’ve heard stories of other close calls both in the wild and in human care. 

Now, if you’ve looked at all those videos, you’ll have noticed that there’s one major difference between these elephant “headstands” and the true headstands you might see elephants do at a circus - only the babies are lifting their feet off the ground (generally before promptly falling over). Does this mean that the headstands performing elephants are doing are different in a way that injurious? Not necessarily! Animals practice behaviors they have reasons to continue repeating - and things like lifting up the back feet for a headstand take both balance and specific muscle strength. If you look back at the post about elephants walking on two legs while foraging, compare the duration of the adult bull’s stand to the one done by the young calf; the adult has much better balance and the correct musculature to support his stance, whereas the little guy has a lot of practicing to do before he can sustain the same sort of pose. Both these elephants will practice two-legged stands throughout their life because it is a behavior that is reinforced by their environment (it helps them reach tasty things). 

When it comes to headstands, lifting their back legs off the ground isn’t going to be beneficial to most elephants - in fact, a full-grown adult elephant falling over the way the rubbery calves do during practice could really do damage  - so wild elephants eventually learn to do a version of the “headstand” behavior that leaves their feet on the ground and builds the correct musculature for shoving and squishing in that position, rather than using their energy too learn a vertical balancing behavior that they’re not going to ever need to use. But that doesn’t mean that elephant can’t be taught to build the musculature or develop the balance for a true headstand - it just means they need to start learning it young, when they still bounce without damage if they lose their balance. It’s done by capturing a calf’s spontaneous headstand practice and putting it on cue, and then a) using a target to encourage the back feet to leave the ground and b) encouraging increases in duration of the stand, as the elephant develop the muscle strength to do so. 

Training elephants to do “trick” behaviors is a super controversial topic, so I want to be clear here: my goal is not to convince you that elephants “should” be taught to do headstands, but teach people that wild elephants have a very similar natural behavior that they use throughout their lives. However, it is also important to me to clarify that it is possible to teach true headstand behaviors  elephants in human care - and maintain them - entirely with positive training methods, despite what certain activist groups would have people believe.

I’ve embedded two videos below from AZA zoos whose elephants do true headstands on cue in entirely protected-contact management situations - the trainers cuing the behavior, in both videos, are separated from the trainers by both a barrier and at least ten feet of distance. (In the second video, the trainers are separated from the elephant by an underwater wall that prevents the animals from exiting the pool at that location.) The videos were taken in the fall of 2014 and summer of 2017, respectively. AZA required all member facilities to have switched over to “protected contact” management (where trainers do not share unrestricted space with an animal at any time, and a style of elephant care which necessitates the use of positive reinforcement training) at the beginning of 2014, so if the headstand behavior was truly aversive to the animals performing it, it would have had plenty of time to extinguish by the filming of the first video, and certainly would have by the time the second one was taken three years later. As I detailed in an post looking at animal training through the lens of systems theory, it’s very hard to get an animal to work against it’s own internal interests (it requires a lot of very strong motivating stimulus); so if these headstands were truly aversive to the specific elephant in their specific situation, no bucket of treats would be motivating enough to counteract the elephant’s desire to not to the behavior - and especially not for the behavior to have sustained for so many years. 

2014 - Hogle Zoo

2017 - Oregon Zoo

ಪ್ರಾಣಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ಎಂದರೆ ಹಾಗೆಯೇ, ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಯಾವಾಗ ಏನು ನಡೆಯುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂದು ಹೇಳುವುದು ಕಷ್ಟ. ಅದರಲ್ಲೂ ಆನೆಗಳು (Elephants) ಎಂದರೆ ಯಾರಿಗೆ ತಾನೇ ಇಷ್ಟವಿಲ್ಲ? ಅವುಗಳ ಆಟ-ಪಾಠ, ತುಂಟಾಟಗಳನ್ನು ನೋಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದರೆ ಸಮಯ ಕಳೆಯುವುದೇ ಗೊತ್ತಾಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಸಾಮಾಜಿಕ ಜಾಲತಾಣಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಆನೆಗಳಿಗೆ (Viral Video) ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿದ ವಿಡಿಯೋಗಳು ಸದಾ ಸದ್ದು ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿರುತ್ತವೆ. ಆದರೆ, ಆನೆಗಳು ಯಾವಾಗಲೂ ಶಾಂತವಾಗಿರುತ್ತವೆ ಎಂದುಕೊಂಡರೆ ಅದು ತಪ್ಪು! ಸಾಮಾನ್ಯವಾಗಿ ಆನೆಗಳು ಅಷ್ಟು ಬೇಗ ತಾಳ್ಮೆ…

Elephants, the largest land mammals on Earth, are truly remarkable creatures. Found across Africa and Asia, these magnificent animals are known for their intelligence, social bonds, and incredible size. In the wild, elephants live in diverse habitats ranging from the grassy savannas of Africa to the tropical forests of Asia. Their presence in these ecosystems is vital, as they help shape the environment in ways few other animals can.

Elephants are social animals, living in family groups led by a matriarch, the oldest female in the herd. These groups provide protection and support, with mothers and siblings working together to care for the young. The strong bonds between family members are essential for the survival of the herd, and elephants have been known to mourn the loss of loved ones, showcasing their emotional depth.

In the wild, elephants are herbivores, and their feeding habits have a profound impact on the landscape. As they search for food, they clear paths, knock down trees, and dig for water, which helps create spaces for other species to thrive. Their role as "ecosystem engineers" is vital for maintaining the health of their habitats.

However, elephants face numerous threats, including habitat loss, poaching, and human-wildlife conflict. Efforts to protect these magnificent creatures are more important than ever, as their survival is crucial not only to their species but to the ecosystems they help sustain. Conservation initiatives are working to combat poaching, protect elephant habitats, and ensure a future for these majestic animals.

Elephants remind us of the beauty and fragility of nature, and the importance of preserving wildlife for future generations. Their wisdom, strength, and grace continue to captivate and inspire all who encounter them.