Scientists See Mourning Elephants on YouTube


It was 2013 when Sanjeeta Pokharel first witnessed Asian elephants react to death. An old female elephant died from an infection in an Indian park. was a younger woman walk in circles around the carcass. The fresh dung piles hinted that other elephants had visited recently.

“That’s where we’re wondering” A biologist at the Smithsonian Institute for Conservation Biology, Dr. said Pocharel. He and Nachiketha Sharma, a wildlife biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, wanted to know more. But seeing such a moment in person is rare, as Asian elephants are difficult forest dwellers.

For An article published on Wednesday In the journal Royal Society Open Science, scientists used YouTube to crowdsource videos of Asian elephants reacting to death. In addition to touching and standing, they found responses such as poking, kicking, and shaking. In a few cases, females even used their trunks to transport deceased calves or baby elephants.

The study is part of a growing field called comparative tanatology – the study of how different animals respond to death. African elephants have been found to repeatedly visit and touch carcasses. But for Asian elephants, Dr. “There were stories about it, there were newspaper documents, but there were no scientific documents,” Pokharel said.

Scanning YouTube, researchers found 24 cases for the study. A co-author, Raman Sukumar of the Indian Institute of Science, provided videos of an additional case.

The most common responses included smelling and touching. For example, many elephants touched the face or ears of a carcass with their trunks. Two young elephants used their legs to shake a deceased person. In three cases, mothers repeatedly kicked their dying or dead calves.

Dr. Pokharel said that Asian elephants also communicate by touch while living. They can sleep against each other or offer reassuring body touches. Younger elephants are often seen walking with their trunks tucked together, he said.

Another frequent response to death was making noise. The elephants in the videos murmured, roared, or rumbled. Elephants often kept some kind of watch over a carcass: They stayed nearby, sometimes sleeping nearby, and sometimes trying to chase away humans who were trying to investigate. Some tried to lift or pull their fallen peers.

Then there was the behavior that was “quite surprising to us,” said Dr. Pokharel: In five cases, adult females – possibly mothers – carried the corpses of deceased calves.

Yet the observation was not entirely new. Researchers have seen monkey and monkey mothers holding dead babies. Dolphins and whales they can carry dead calves on their backs or push them to the surface of the water as if calling them to breathe. Phyllis Lee, an elephant researcher at the University of Stirling in Scotland, said that an African elephant mother carried her dead calf for a full day, covering the carcass on her tusks.

To the human eye, these animals may look like bereaved parents who are not ready to leave their young. Dr. While being cautious about interpreting the animals’ movements, Pokharel said “handling is not usual behavior” in elephants, as calves often follow the herd on their own feet.

“Carrying yourself may indicate that they are aware that there is a problem with the calf,” he said.

Dr. Learning more about how elephants view death “can give us insight into their extremely complex cognitive abilities,” Pokharel said. Even more urgently, he hopes this will help better protect surviving elephants, especially Asian elephants, which often come into conflict with humans.

“We always talk about habitat loss, we talk about all that,” he said. “We’re not talking about what animals go through psychologically.”

Dr. Lee described the observations cited in the new paper as “wonderful and confirming.”

Dr. “These rare and extremely important natural history observations suggest that there is a sense of loss in elephants,” Lee said.

Scientists do not yet know to what extent elephants have grasped the concept of death, rather than the former absence of a herd member with a trunk within reach. But that doesn’t make animals very different from us, said Dr. Lee. “Even for us humans, our primary experience is probably lost.”



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