Social, Communicative : Elephants Seem to Excel at Chitchat

African elephants have eyes like old amber--riveting, almost red--veiled behind thickly curled lashes. They do not see very well.

What their eyes deny them, however, their remarkable noses provide. Their sense of smell is keen enough to distinguish between individuals watching them from a car, and probably, to tell what each person had for breakfast that morning.

Their only natural enemy is man. Elephants will browse all day under the gaze of tourists, but will depart immediately at the first whiff of a Masai tribesman.

They have toenails but no toes, and feet so softly padded that they can move in virtual silence despite their bulk. They have no elephant graveyard--a myth--but seem humanly shocked at the spectacle of death.

Care for Their Trunks

They lie down to sleep, usually around midnight, and find three or four hours sufficient. They like a pile of grass for a pillow, although the slope of an anthill will do. They take care to curl their trunks, or keep the end propped on a tusk, to prevent ants from crawling in.

Elephants are the world’s largest land mammals. Still, they are peaceable creatures and seldom fight--although a six-ton bull elephant, ears outspread, standing tusk-to-bumper with a one-ton jeep, is a sight guaranteed to call to mind the essential frailness of the human condition.

All but the very youngest elephants look wise. Perhaps they are. Their social organization is complex, and it is passed on, generation to generation, apparently by learned behavior rather than instinct. Elephants live in a world of precisely defined hierarchies, social ceremony and maybe even diplomacy. All this is somehow learned or taught. The mystery is how.

Talking Elephants

Here in Amboseli, the impression came to scientists Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole years ago that elephants might “talk” to each other--communicate in some way that humans could not detect, much less understand. It turns out that they were right.

The confirmation of their intuition came, not from the wild, but from a zoo in Portland, Ore. There, in the latest step toward unraveling a mystery, a Cornell University team headed by zoologist Katharine Payne has demonstrated that elephants do, in fact, communicate by infrasonic means--with sounds at frequencies too low to be detected by the human ear.

To Moss and Poole, the discovery holds great excitement--and at least some mild frustration--since between them, these two American researchers have spent more than 25 years studying the behavior of African elephants in the wild.

Their experience puts them among the foremost elephant researchers. Moss, 45, is an associate of the African Wildlife Foundation and the author of a highly regarded book on East African wildlife, “Portraits in the Wild.” She is completing a second work on her observations of elephants.

Poole, 29, a Cambridge University Ph.D. who has done extensive studies of male elephants, is doing post-doctoral research at Princeton University, supported by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.

With the self-sufficiency of veterans and formidable Swahili language skill, they operate from a simple tented camp tucked amid towering thorn trees at the edge of a meadow in this national park. They have come to recognize on sight about 650 individual elephants.

But the breakthrough study on elephants’ infrasonic noises came at Portland’s Washington Park Zoo. Payne, who, with her former husband, Roger, is known in zoological circles for her work on whale communication, used highly sensitive equipment to record otherwise undetectable sounds made by a small group of captive Asian elephants.

Payne and her team spent a night in an enclosure with the elephants, and the sounds they recorded ranged between 14 and 24 hertz, which is beneath or just bordering the lower limits of human hearing (ranging approximately from 20 to 20,000 hertz).

Completely inaudible “conversations” between the elephants went on through much of the night. The team also discovered that the audible “rumbles” often made by elephants--noises once regarded as part of the elephant’s digestive processes--were often the upper harmonics of sounds unheard by the human ear. Moreover, the intensity of the sounds recorded suggest that they could carry to elephants for long distances.

Sociable and Fascinating

The theory, still unproved, that infrasonic elephant calls could carry as far as one or two miles makes sense, say Moss and Poole. To them, such a discovery would seem to fit into the intricate pattern of behavior and sociability that continues to make elephants among the world’s most fascinating wild animals.

And although it was made in an American zoo, its significance is more likely to be unraveled in settings such as Amboseli, about 100 miles south of Nairobi, where these great beasts roam freely in their natural habitat.

“It’s a very exciting development,” Moss said recently. “Katy Payne discovered that these elephants were talking all night. When you speed the recordings up, it sounds like a conversation. It’s almost spooky and a little bit frustrating. I’ve been watching elephants for 18 years, and they have been doing these things without my knowing it.”

Since her discovery, Payne has visited Amboseli twice to work with Poole and Moss to record elephant sounds in the wild. The recordings, difficult to make in an outdoor setting where even mild breezes disturb the sensitive equipment, indicate that extensive infrasonic “conversations” are going on between the elephants here, as well.

While Payne plans to do further research among wild elephants at a game park in Namibia, Poole now has her own sound equipment and will follow up her observations in Amboseli. Her area of specialization is male elephants in “must,” a condition of heightened sexual activity, and she has been collecting data on male “must rumbles”--a distinctive noise, partially audible to humans, made by male elephants during these periods of arousal.

“It seemed to make sense,” Poole said, “that these sounds were being used in communication, sounds that would carry longer distances than humans could detect. Males were making these sounds when they were alone. But females, when they were present, would respond. So it made sense that the male elephants could be making the noises to find out where groups of females were located, or to find out where other must males were.”

Moss came to Africa in 1968 and first worked with Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a Scottish zoologist, in a study of elephants in the Lake Manyara reserve in Tanzania. Douglas-Hamilton’s research was the first long-term study of a single elephant population, and it pioneered techniques that Moss used when her Amboseli project began in 1972.

The most important of these was the identification of individual elephants, since it was impossible to follow the interactions and relationships between individuals and groups unless each elephant could be recognized.

With practice, such identification is easier than it might seem, for no two elephant faces are exactly alike, Moss and Poole say. The ears of most African elephants are tattered and veined in unique patterns. The wide variation in tusks also helps. Adult elephants normally have two tusks, but some have one and others none. Tusks are often broken in different ways. And some bow outward, some inward.

According to the two scientists, the basic elephant social structure is the female-dominated family group, consisting of the oldest female as leader and generally made up of her sisters and daughters and their offspring. Young male elephants usually leave or are expelled from the group shortly after puberty and then form loose associations with other male or female groups.

Respect for Age

The matriarchal structure of the elephant family group, and the careful observance of rank based on age, is a striking constant factor. The female family groups rarely change, except for deaths and the addition of newborn calves. The oldest female in the group is invariably the leader, and her rank can be observed as others give way to her at a water hole or at a fallen tree limb where she wants to eat.

The rankings are clearly defined, so that every elephant in a group knows its place, with junior always giving way to senior.

The groups in Amboseli range from 4 to around 25 elephants, but the average is 10 to 12. There are invariably young calves with each group, with the youngest rarely more than a trunk’s length from the mother. Calves commonly suckle until they are 3 or 4 years old, and will throw small, screaming tantrums if they are denied.

Young female calves--those, say, around 6 to 9 years old--frequently pair off with the babies, almost as if they are playing at mothering and preparing for their essential role in life. Elephants live to about 65, but more males fall victim to poachers because of their larger tusks, and as with humans, there are more old females than males.

Moss has noted that the female elephant groups appear to have closer relations with some groups than with others, suggesting perhaps a wider kinship alignment, perhaps through bond groups or clans.

Some of these groups, when they meet after being separated for a time, go through elaborate greeting rituals. They rumble at each other, entwine trunks, bump each other rump-to-rump, flap their ears and spray around dust. These groups commonly remain close to each other, sometimes separated only by a few hundred yards, sometimes by one or two miles.

Drives to the Elephants

A day spent with Moss or Poole in the field opens up the elephant world in a way that the ordinary, game-viewing tourist, peering from the rooftop hatch of a hotel tour bus, can scarcely imagine. Moss seldom starts her day, in fact, until after the early morning tourist traffic in Amboseli has subsided, and she drives her sturdy Land Rover right to the edges, and sometimes through, the swamps where the elephants like to feed.

“This is Amy’s group,” Moss said, pushing close to a group of about a dozen elephants up to their knees in swampy grass. “There’s Audrey, Albert, Anastasia, Alison, Astrid, Abigail. . . . Other than Agatha, I think everybody’s here. Where’s Agatha?”

Moss, when she began identifying the groups, found it easier to order the process by going through the alphabet. Since there are about 50 groups in the park, she has had to make a second loop through the alphabet. In a box on the floor of the car is a card file with a photograph of each elephant, in case she gets confused, which doesn’t happen often.

“This group has been through some rough times,” Moss said. “It used to be Annabelle’s group, but she got speared in ’74. She was in her 40s, a big old female. Then Amy took over, and Amy got speared and was very ill for a while. She lost one calf in a drought. Then Alice, another female in the group, got speared.”

The elephants are protected in the park, and seem to realize that they are safe within its borders, Moss said, but they usually migrate out of the park in the rainy season, moving to areas where the vegetation is more nutritious than the grass from Amboseli’s alkaline soil.

And although the elephants are theoretically protected wherever they go, young Masai warriors, whose traditional cow-dung villages and hunting grounds surround the park, now and then test their manhood by bringing down an elephant.

The trials of elephant families are, to Moss, like a long-running, slow-moving soap opera, or a big, thick book that can’t be put down. Moss said she has a hard time envisaging a life away from the elephants. Research into the new developments in elephant communication promises to be a task to occupy many more fascinating years and could perhaps plumb the intriguing question of elephant intelligence.

“I think elephants are pretty smart,” Moss said, “although the issue of animal intelligence is a sticky one. We usually use human criteria--a very vague realm--when we talk about intelligence. You can perform certain tests, but do the tests really mean anything about elephants in terms of their survival?

“They have such a complex social life, such long-term bonds with one another, that it seems to set them apart from other animal life. They live in these very tightly knit family groups--very social, always interacting with one another. They have a long childhood, a long learning process. Most of the things elephants do, they have to learn. They are not born with a wide repertoire of instinctual behavior.

“When you watch them for a long time, you begin to realize that something pretty special is going on. You see these elaborate greetings when they get back together. You can see and record, as a scientist, that there are bonds between them that seem very, very strong.”

Whether all that adds up to “intelligence” is hard to determine. Moss says there is something to the notion of an elephant’s formidable memory. She says she believes, for example, that each elephant in the Amboseli population knows and recognizes all the others.

Can Recognize Humans

She is convinced that elephants, with their acute sense of smell, can recognize individual humans watching them from a car, she says. She knows they recognize her. Although she rarely gets out of her Land Rover to walk among them, the elephants seem exceptionally tolerant of her presence, and frequently pause within inches of her window, almost as if offering greetings.

Some signs of elephant emotion are also evident. In long hours of observation, individual personalities have emerged. Some calves, for example, stay close to their mothers, while others are bolder and run off to play with other calves. Some young bulls, 16 to 20 years old, hang forlornly around the mother group long after other bulls their age have accepted their expulsion and gone away.

Sometimes, elephants seem especially frolicsome.

“They get very silly when the rains come,” Moss observed.

The spectacle of death particularly upsets them, arousing what seems to be a mixture of horror and curiosity. Coming across the carcass or bones of another elephant, they become peculiarly tense and quiet, feeling among the remains with their feet and trunks. Moss speculates that they may be attempting to identify the dead individual.

Sometimes, they will pick up the tusks or bones and carry them off, sometimes miles from the carcass, as if reluctant to let go, yet not sure what to do with this burden.

Female elephants will sometimes starve rather than leave a dead calf. Moss’ book recounts the incident of a mother elephant that carried her dead calf for four days. Elephants have been known to bury the dead--not only dead elephants, but other creatures and even humans they have killed.

In one famous incident described in the book, elephants in Uganda broke into a shed where game croppers had stored the ears and feet of slaughtered fellow creatures, to be sold for making handbags and umbrella stands. The elephants buried them.

No Graveyard

Old animals will go off by themselves to die--usually when weakened by the wearing down of their sixth and last set of molars--but there is no such thing as an elephant graveyard, a legend that probably stems from the occasional discovery of masses of bones left behind from some native slaughter, or perhaps a mass drowning.

Joyce Poole’s observations of male elephants seem to offer especially intriguing possibilities of elephant communication. Males, like females, have a rigid age-size hierarchy (and they are twice as big as females), but the whole system is thrown off by the must period, which comes to male elephants about once a year.

Normally, a young bull elephant will give way to an older male. But if the younger male is in must, he becomes dominant. When fights occur between males--and such incidents, Poole says, are rare--it is usually between two males in must. In any case, males are more unpredictable during must, and the accounts of wild “rogue” elephants probably involve males in that state. Poole’s Guggenheim and mental health grants go to support her studies of aggression in male elephants.

The must period lasts anywhere from a few days to several months, and Poole has noted that each of the dominant bulls in Amboseli thcomes into must at the same time every year. These dominant bulls tend to have their must periods at the most advantageous time for breeding purposes, coinciding with the onset of the long rainy season.

At least part of this information is communicated, elephant to elephant, by smell, for a bull in must gives off a strong odor. But Poole has also been struck by the way that less-dominant male elephants will move away from a herd of females at the approach of a must male, probably well before his scent could be detected. The infrasonic rumble may be an explanation.

“I think it’s interesting that they communicate in infrasound,” Poole said one day recently as she sat in her jeep surrounded by a group of elephants, “but what is going to be really exciting will be studying the messages--the content of those sounds.

Groups May Communicate “We think it is pretty reasonable to assume that these sounds can travel a long distance, and it’s possible that elephant groups, even when they are separated, still may be communicating with each other.

“For example, there appears to be some hierarchy among the female groups--in other words, one group may be dominant over another one. Sometimes you can see a group stop eating in one place and move off. Then about 15 minutes later, another group takes its place. You think it is just coincidence, but it is possible that some vocal signal has been passed, and the first group may be making way for a more dominant group.”

Poole paused in her explanation. “Listen!” she said.

Her passenger heard nothing at first, and then a low, fluttering rumble.

“Listen!”

It was an old, one-tusk male, 11 feet high and all of six tons, in must or not far from it. The animal was moving about the herd of females, testing them with his trunk, one by one, to see if any were receptive to his advances. He did not appear to be getting much response from some nonchalant females, placidly tearing off tufts of grass and stuffing them in their mouths. There were, however, some answering rumbles.

“Listen!” Poole said again. “And remember, we’re just hearing part of it.”