Rhodes students to study elephant grief Zoo partnership offers rare chance to collect data
Daisy really likes to eat dirt. She doesn’t discriminate if there’s only mud available. When a new batch of dirt is delivered, she spends the whole day sampling. When she pinched a trunkful off the ground one recent Thursday morning, Natalie Thomas took note of the interesting behavior.
“It’s very odd,” Thomas said. “She must like the taste.”
Daisy shares her home, the elephant exhibit at the Memphis Zoo, with four others: Gina, Bambi, Asali and Tyranza, known as “Ty,” who is the oldest living African elephant in North America, the zoo says. About 50 students from Rhodes College, like Thomas, have logged thousands of hours of behavioral observations of the herd at Memphis Zoo since 2011.
The long-term research project, a partnership between Rhodes and the zoo, is a study in elephant behavior and social dynamics. Each elephant’s behavioral quirks — like Daisy’s penchant for eating dirt — establish patterns of behavior that reveal personalities and a social hierarchy.
This substantial amount of continuous data will show how elephants age.
When the time comes, it will also show how a herd grieves.
The death of a leader in the herd is an inevitability in both captivity and the wild, but one of increased frequency for the vulnerable species, whose population is in decline largely due to poaching.
Thomas is “not looking forward to that day” the grief study begins, she said, explaining the strength of social bonds between the female herd.
But she recognizes the rare opportunity to continue with the research, which she began participating in last summer.
How the data gets collected
Rhodes professor Sarah Boyle works with Steve Reichling, the zoo’s director of conservation and research, on several partnership projects at the zoo.
Rhodes students have collected
6,000 hours of observation each for Ty, Gina and Asali. They’ve accumulated 500 hours each for Bambi and Daisy, who joined the herd within the last two years.
Of the partnership projects, the elephant study is the longest-running. It’s not common to have so many hours of behavior observations for one herd, Boyle explained.
Over the course of an hour at the zoo, students like Thomas make note of elephant behavior every two minutes, logging the code for that behavior and indicating where in the exhibit the elephant is located.
The data qualifies the interactions between each elephant, categorizing them as positive, negative and neutral interactions, which can be matched with how close the elephants are to one another.
Eating, unsurprisingly, is the most common activity for Thomas to observe, she said. At this point, she’s memorized the locations on the grid where barrels of hay dangle down for elephants to grab.
Thomas is quick to note the hierarchy: “Bambi and Daisy will share a barrel. Asali will have a barrel to herself or share with Ty. But Gina will steal a barrel from Asali, Bambi and Daisy.”
Behavior patterns reveal how elephants respond and rebuild after death
Right now, it’s not clear whether or not Ty, the oldest, is still the true matriarch, or leader, of the herd, Boyle said.
Gina, the spunkiest elephant of the bunch, is beginning to take on that role in some aspects. The students and other staff at the zoo have all developed their own opinions about the shift in behavior, and whether Gina has taken the role over from Ty.
Daisy falls into the third spot, said Amanda Schweighart, the zoo’s elephant manager. Bambi and Asali fall to the bottom of the herd’s social structure, with neither wanting to be the boss over the other.
Thomas interprets the behaviors as the matriarch position being in a transitional phase, she said. Memphis Zoo’s herd of five females is much smaller than a herd that would generally be found in the wild, Thomas said, but elephants in the wild also separate into herds by gender.
The oldest elephant in the herd, which is oftentimes the matriarch, is usually the target of poachers, since the older elephants generally have the longest tusks.
“So when that poacher kills a 60year-old matriarch, (the herd is) losing 60 years of information, especially if it’s made up primarily of younger elephants,” she said. “They’ve lost that information of where it’s safe to go, where to find water, where to find food, which animals to avoid, everything.”
On the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, researchers have spent years observing the social dynamics of elephant herds. As matriarchs and other elephants in the herd have died, they’ve watched on to observe how the animals cope.
Doctoral student Shifra Goldenberg shared a video with National Geographic of elephants on the reserve after the death of a matriarch named Queen Victoria. Though some researchers disagree on whether to call elephants’ actions “grief ” (that could imply that researchers know what the elephants are thinking), there are clearly observable behaviors that highlight the emotional bonds.
Elephants in the video gather with one another around Queen Victoria’s body, inspecting it with their trunks. After a death in the herd, elephants have scattered their family members’ bones and raised a foot over the body. Others have pushed and pulled a body as other elephants stood by silently and as others rocked back and forth, National Geographic reported.
The responses vary, but are striking, and highlight that the behavior observed is driven by emotion, and not out of necessity, George Wittemyer, a longtime researcher at the reserve, told National Geographic in 2016.
“The fact that they interact and have behavioral interactions with their dead in a form that is not explainable in any simple, evolutionary context speaks to the deeper emotional lives of elephants that we can’t easily study,” he said.
Wittemyer is part of another research project on orphan elephants whose families and herds have been disrupted by poaching. The research, as reported by The New York Times in 2016, logs orphan behavior, tracking positive and negative interactions among the herd, much like the research done by Rhodes students at the Memphis Zoo.
The research shows how elephants both respond to death and rebuild.
Research also encourages visitor education
Thomas has always preferred animals to people, she said, but the research work has led to more interaction than she’d thought. As people ask her questions about why she’s watching the elephants with a clipboard and a stopwatch, in telling them about her research, she’s also telling them about why the elephants matter.
“I’ve even had little kids come up to me and be like, ‘Are you a scientist?’” she said.
“There was a little girl who wanted to be an author, and her sister wanted to be the scientist” who would write the book about her sister’s research.