(Posted 26th February 2025)
Courtesy of African Elephant News and Leocadia Bongben, Mongabay
Not all elephants are the same. A new study has found that male African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) develop distinctive personality traits as they age.
“We wanted to know whether male elephants have distinct characters and found that not only do [they], but certain individuals within the society are influential and can have a positive psychological impact on the group,” Caitlin E. O’Connell-Rodwell, lead author of the study and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, wrote to Mongabay via email. “We also wanted to see if the existence of mixed ages benefited the population (which, indeed, it did). Adult males are positively influenced by the presence of younger and socially well-connected males.”
O’Connell-Rodwell and colleagues found five personality qualities from ten behavioral categories — affiliation, aggression, dominance, self-directed anxiety and self-directed comfort — in individual elephants. Depending on the social context, some of these traits were repeated.
Nekedi Maputla, a senior conservation scientist at the African Wildlife Foundation not involved in the study, said the ten behavioral categories are “especially appealing to me.”
The research was conducted at the Mushara waterhole in northern Namibia’s Etosha National Park during five field seasons, 2007 to 2011. The researchers used an 8-meter- (26-foot-) tall tower to obtain a 360-degree view of the clearing and gathered behavioral data on 34 male elephants at the same waterhole between mid-June and the end of July.
“We used a behavioral datalogger to score behaviors continuously while groups of male elephants visited the waterhole at our study site… We chose to use continuous sampling across years to have a richer dataset for behaviors that did not occur often, and that allowed us to ask several additional questions about male elephant sociality,” O’Connell-Rodwell added.
A Dive Into the Male Elephant Society
African savannah elephants, the biggest land animals on the planet, are socially advanced and highly intelligent mammals. Michael Viyof Kuwong, wildlife veterinary officer at the WWF Kudu Zombo Programme, said this is equally true for African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) which are intuitive, including being capable of outsmarting humans on some strategies to mitigate human-wildlife conflict, rendering the strategies less effective.
The study describes male elephant society as dynamic, consisting of dominant hierarchies, complex social networks, and associations based on long-term relationships, kinship, age structure and reproductive status. These factors impact the expression of consistent behaviors.
Unlike female elephants, who spend their entire lives in family groups, male elephants navigate complex all-male societies. They also spend more time alone than their female counterparts, according to the study.
O’Connell-Rodwell said that male elephants are much like humans, capable of a range of characters and a range of tendencies towards socialization.
“Most males will interact while at the waterhole, very few choose not to (and those few tend to be much older). Of the males that socialize, some are extremely social, others well connected within a broad social network,” O’Connell-Rodwell wrote.
The well-connected male elephants — known as keystone males — have the most extensive social network and are the most solicitous of others. A keystone male initiates play and calls other elephants to follow him wherever he goes, though not all senior individuals desire younger males to follow them.
“Everyone wants to be around the keystone male, follow and interact with him. They [other male elephants] will be so excited to greet him that they will stand in line to do so…and the younger ones can’t wait, so they all place their trunks in his mouth at once (this behavior being the elephant greeting — or secret handshake),” O’Connell-Rodwell continued.
Understanding Elephant Personalities Can Help Conservation
Like all large herbivores, elephants play key roles in ecosystems and are culturally and economically significant for the region. However, they are also severely affected by human disturbance and climate change.
The researchers said they believe that knowing elephant behavior is critical for good wildlife management, which aids conservation. The US-based researchers said that conservation managers may be able to determine which elephants are likely to, or already involved in, a human-elephant conflict if they repeat behaviors like boldness, which measures the elephant’s reaction to a new or risky situation.
Maputla said such studies provide insight into important behavioral patterns influencing species’ survival. He referenced related research on elephants conducted in the neighboring Botswana’s Kgalagadi Park, where the researchers emphasized the significance of the oldest elephant bulls, who tended to guide herd movements collectively, especially young bulls that are still acclimating to the terrain, by teaching them the distribution of resources and which dangerous areas to avoid.
“The more we understand the social nature of male elephant society, the better we can manage populations by allowing social opportunities (understanding that social interaction is enriching) and ensuring that populations have a mix of ages to facilitate psychological well-being,” O’Connell-Rodwell went on to say.
A recent order to kill an elephant for destroying crops in Kalfou, Cameroon, highlights the complexity here. Against this backdrop, Maputla said that by investing in understanding savannah elephant behavior, conservation managers can discern whether an elephant has had run-ins with people under different circumstances, like hunting and poaching, resource conflict, or cordial coexistence.
By radio-collaring elephants and studying their habitat use, it is also possible to examine the speed with which elephants traverse different areas in the landscape, with the expectation that they are likely to move faster in risky areas than in safe terrain. It is also imperative to study trends in elephant activities in the landscape relative to resource distribution, Maputla added.
Several strategies have been devised to reduce human-elephant conflict, including pepper grenades, pepper hedges and beehives. However, Kuwong said, over time, elephants learn to outsmart humans, rendering mitigation tactics less efficient. He said that conflict behavior, such as crop raiding or property damage, can be mitigated if elephant behavior is better understood, citing an example of farmers lighting fires to keep forest elephants, seemingly scared of smoke, out of their farms.
“Certain male elephants are well-connected individuals and, if recognized as being highly socially integrated, they should be specially looked after for the next generation,” concluded O’Connell-Rodwell.
