Can Elephants Understand Humans?

Watching animals, I've always wondered: "What are they saying, and do they know what I'm saying?"  Elephants may be able to have an idea what we humans are saying to them!  And, middle school students helped discover this!

A new study reveals that elephants are not able to recognize visual cues provided by humans but are responsive to vocal commands. These findings may directly impact protocols for future efforts to conserve elephants, which are in danger of extinction in this century due to increased poaching and human/elephant conflict.

The study, led by Dr Josh Plotnik from the University of Cambridge and founder of Think Elephants International, a not-for-profit organization that strives to promote elephant conservation through scientific research, education programming and international collaborations, was designed in partnership with and co-authored by 12-14 year-old students from a middle school in New York. It was recently published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

"Dogs have a great sense of smell, but appear to be able to follow human pointing as a way of finding food," said Dr Joshua Plotnik, founder and CEO of Think Elephants and a researcher at the University of Cambridge. "Perhaps elephants' sense of smell is one of their primary senses, meaning that they prefer to use it when navigating their physical world."

The research tested whether elephants could follow visual, social cues (pointing and gazing) to find food hidden in one of two buckets. The elephants failed at this task, but were able to follow vocal commands telling them which bucket contained the food. These results suggest that elephants may navigate their physical world in ways that primates and dogs, prior subjects of animal cognition studies, do not.

In the field of animal cognition, there has been considerable attention focused on how animals interact with each other and humans. Particularly, there is a lot of interest in how dogs are able to read social cues to understand what people see, know or want. Remarkably, non-human primates such as chimpanzees are not good at this, suggesting it may be that through domestication or long-term human contact, dogs have developed a capacity for following social cues provided by people. Think Elephants aimed to test elephants on this because they are a wild, non-domesticated species that, in captivity in Thailand, are in relatively constant contact with humans.

The study's findings have important implications for future protection protocols for wild elephants. According to Dr Plotnik, "If elephants are not primarily using sight to navigate their natural environment, human-elephant conflict mitigation techniques must consider what elephants' main senses are and how elephants think so that they might be attracted or deterred effectively as a situation requires.

"The loss of natural habitat, poaching for ivory, and human-elephant conflict are serious threats to the sustainability of elephants in the wild. Put simply, we will be without elephants, and many other species in the wild, in less than 50 years if the world does not act."

To mitigate this, Dr Plotnik suggests additional research on elephant behaviour and an increase in educational programming are needed, particularly in Asia where the market for ivory is so strong.

The publication of the research is the climax of a three-year endeavour to create a comprehensive middle school curriculum that brings elephants into classrooms as a way to educate young people about conservation by getting them directly involved in work with endangered species. Think Elephants' education program in NYC is a pilot that will be expanding to Thai schools later in 2013.

The students were integrally involved in the development of this study, even helping to design some of the experimental control conditions. The study was carried out at Think Elephants' field site in northern Thailand, and students participated via webcam conversation and direct web-links to the elephant camp. This shows that collaborations that include both academics and young students can be productive, informative and exciting.

According to Dr Jen Pokorny, Think Elephants' head of education programs, "We are so proud of our pilot program with East Side Middle School and hope to use this as a model for other schools. This wonderful group of students had an opportunity that very few young people have and, as a result, are now published co-authors on a significant piece of animal behaviour research.

"Think Elephants is committed to showcasing these productive, informative and exciting student collaborations, and we believe similar studies can help to change the way in which young people observe and appreciate their global environment."

~Josh Plotnik

PHYS.org

August 29, 2013

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Picture of the Day

This photograph is so sweet!  Michael Nichols did an amazing job of capturing this moment in Zakouma National Park, Chad.  

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Big Step Forward In Elephant Conservation

According to the Christian Science Monitor, this is a big step for the elephant conservation movement.  In the past, when someone is caught smuggling ivory, they face small penalties.  This Chinese woman is facing more than two years in prison. 

As Elephants Vanish, Kenya Puts Chinese Ivory Smuggler in Prison

Days after Kenyan leader Uhuru Kenyatta signed $5 billion in projects with China that included a nod to wildlife preservation, Kenyan courts sentenced a Chinese woman to more than two years in jail for her attempt to smuggle ivory from the East African nation.

The sentence given Chen Beimei is the first of its kind in Kenya, where authorities so far have levied only small fines for ivory smugglers – even while doling out tougher penalties on local poachers who directly kill animals.

Ms. Chen was arrested Aug. 14 while trying to smuggle pieces of ivory weighing more than 15 pounds in bags that she declared to be containing macadamia nuts. She was apprehended while boarding a Kenyan Airways Flight to Hong Kong from Nairobi, and late last week pleaded guilty to the charges.

Her jail sentence comes as gangs are poaching elephants and rhinos to feed a demand for ivory in the Asian market. China and Thailand are thought to be the biggest consumers, with the items being used for ornaments and medicine.

Kenyan President Kenyatta was in Beijing last week to sign a major deal that will see China build a railroad through Kenya from the Indian Ocean to Uganda.

But China also agreed, according to Kenyatta, to support efforts to stop poaching wildlife and endangered species, even though Beijing has had difficulty curbing the exploitation of endangered species at home.

The ivory issue has become more sensitive as elephant populations decline and a law is being debated in Kenya's parliament to impose prison terms of as many as 15 years or fines of more than $100,000 on those convicted of threatening endangered species.

The Kenyan Wildlife Service reports that in 1979 some 167,000 elephants roamed the savanna, but today the creatures number fewer than 40,000.

Kenyan authorities say that in 2013 so far, some 190 elephants and 35 rhino have been killed by poachers. The rhino population is at a crisis level with only 1,025 remaining in the country, say authorities.

Kenyan Wildlife Service spokesman Paul Udoto said after Chen's sentencing that “This sends the message to other gangs that dealing with ivory in Kenya will be made a high-cost affair and low-profit business. Those engaged in smuggling should be ready to pay heavy losses including long jail terms.”

This year, some 17 smugglers from six nations have been apprehended in Kenya. These include eight Chinese, six Vietnamese, and one each from the United States, Tanzania, and South Sudan. In March, a Chinese man was set free by the courts after being fined $350 for illegally holding some 400 pieces of ivory.

It is not clear if Asian or Chinese smugglers are paying the poachers upfront, but what is clear is that Asia and China are the destination point for the ivory and rhino horns.

On Aug. 22, the day Chen was incarcerated, Kenya’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Natural Resources issued a statement saying the trade in wildlife and its products posed a “major challenge.”

Poaching and wildlife trafficking are “more organized,” lucrative, and widespread, and are “undermining” Kenya’s effort to preserve its wild creatures, according to Judi Wakhungu, cabinet secretary for the ministry.

Speaking in Beijing last week, Kenyatta told reporters, “The Chinese government understands that poaching is a problem. The most important thing is that they are not just talking about it but working to solve it.”

Kenyatta’s office later issued a statement that China will help improve surveillance around national parks and game reserves and aid Kenya in adding to the ranks of the current 3,000 wildlife rangers who deal with poachers – with further details to come. 

~Christian Science Monitor

August 26, 2013
Fredrick Nzwili

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From Today's NEW YORK TIMES

Elephants are known for their intelligence.  But this article beautifully sums up how intelligent they really are.  The elephants have a way of communication- they pass down information, mourn at others' deaths, and will have their own type of "farewell service" by all performing the same trunk motions.  Elephants are so much smarter than we think.  

We need to learn how to coexist with the elephants- and above all, love, appreciate and protect them.  They are majestic creatures, and we cannot let them slip from our earth.  

I strongly recommend the World Wildlife Fund free app for iPad.  It talks about many endangered animals with an fun, and interactive way of teaching, shows many pictures of the animals, and gives facts about them. You can learn more about it here!  

Documenting Elephants’ Compassion, and Their Slaughter

"When Michael Nichols first photographed elephants in the lowland forests of the Central African Republic in 1991, he only caught fleeting moments of them, and at great peril. These sensitive behemoths were so afraid of ivory poachers hunting them down, they thundered off at the slightest hint of human activity.

It took him 16 years to encounter elephants who were not fearful of humans, on the savannah of Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, where they were protected and used to tourists. He spent two years there photographing a group of 600 elephants, gradually comprehending their complex relationships, intelligence and compassion.

When one family mourned the death of a female, the elephants approached and surrounded the corpse, touched it with their trunks, and started swaying back and forth. Matriarchs from nearby elephant families joined in.

“They go to the corpse and they won’t leave it,” Mr. Nichols said. “Even when it’s just bones. Once a year they’ll visit the bones and hold them with their trunk. I would call that mourning.”

His 20-year project, “Earth to Sky,” is being published by Aperture this week. It is a stunningly beautiful book, whose images, many of them taken while on assignment for National Geographic magazine, reflect experiences that had a profound effect on Mr. Nichols.

“These are the most caring and sentient creatures on earth,” he wrote in the book, “yet they suffer so horribly at the hand of man.”

He was helped in the savannah by Daniel Lentipo, a Samburu tribesman who had worked with a researcher from the environmental organization Save the Elephants. Mr. Lentipo could spot and identify almost any elephant, even from a great distance, and knew the individual names that had been bestowed on each. Mr. Nichols and his guide followed a family led by a matriarch named Navajo.

Normally, elephants sleep standing up to be alert to impending danger. But these ones felt comfortable enough that in the middle of the night the whole family lay down and went to sleep “just snoring and farting” around the two men.

Mr. Nichols saw complex societal relationships unfold and photographed elders teaching and taking care of young orphans. He also noticed that these elephants were so sensitive to their environment, it was as if they were carrying around an internal weather station. Not to mention a memory — you guessed it — as good as an elephant’s.

“The old ladies got to know where they found water 20 years ago during a drought,” he said of the matriarchs. “Elephants are passing on knowledge just like indigenous tribes would or we might today.”

If only humans were as faithful to the past. The volume includes Mr. Nichols’s elegiac black and white photographs (Slides 6 through 10) of a massacre by ivory poachers in Chad in 2006 that he says was the beginning of a full-scale elephant slaughter that continues to today. With each tusk fetching up to $6,000, tens of thousands of elephants throughout Africa are killed for their tusks.

“Ivory simply must be devalued,” Mr. Nichols wrote. “Those who buy it and use it and carve it must be shamed. Elephants are perceptive, conscious and responsive animals; they cannot be terrorized and massacred by a world that calls itself civilized. We have to forget about the absurd indulgence of ivory — a useless status symbol — and put our focus and resources into the far more complex problem of how elephants and humans can share land in an overtaxed continent.”

He sees this as more than a conservation issue. Both in the jungles and on the plains, ecosystems depend on elephants to clear the land for other animals to use. But there is an “almost spiritual” experience, he said, in seeing large herds of elephants walking freely across Africa’s plains.

“Elephants should be here just because they need to be here,” he said. “The earth is not the earth without them.”

~New York Times

James Estrin

August 28, 2013

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Letter From Hillary Clinton!

Hey there, readers! I was amazed to find a letter in my post box addressed to me- from Washington D.C. during summer vacation!  After (carefully) opening the envelope, I was thrilled to find a personal letter from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton!  

According to her letter (you can read below) the best thing to help the elephants is to continue supporting wildlife organizations, for example, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DSWT).  You can click here to access the WWF page and click here for the DSWT page. 

Welcome back to E is for Elephants!  

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