Photo taken by photographer, Jenner Parker
Do you go to your friends when facing grief? Well, elephants do too!
A recent research led by Jenna Parker, an ecologist from Colorado State University, analyses stress hormones in elephants that had lost their mother. The study shows that young, orphaned elephants seem to benefit, physically and measurably, from other young elephants’s support, according the paper Social support correlates with glucocorticoid concentrations in wild African elephant orphans.
It has been discovered that orphaned elephants with more similarly aged “friends” in their herd had lower stress hormone levels. This suggests that "social support" might reduce the stress caused by the loss of a mother in these intelligent and highly social animals.
"If you're out in the field, watching elephants, you can just tell that family life is everything," Parker told BBC News. "Calves are rarely more than maybe ten metres from their mother until they're about eight or nine years old.
"And if some of the elephants [in a group] go off, you'll hear them calling to one another. They want to know where each other are all the time."
The foundation of this study is sad and unfortunate. Between 2009 and 2013, there was a substantial increase in poaching for ivory in the two reserves in Kenya where this study took place. Many young elephants were left orphaned. One piece of research from the same group revealed that motherless calves generally faced more aggression from other elephants in their group.
To carry out measurements of the hormone levels of the elephants, Parker followed groups of African elephants over a period of more than a year. In fact, she revealed that she had to watch and wait for each individual she was studying to poop, to enable her to get a dung sample to analyse.
"You get to be around elephants all day, but you have to have your binoculars and really keep your eye on their back ends and their tails to make sure you got the right individual," she explained.
With this careful monitoring and dung-sampling, she and colleagues were able to study 25 orphaned African elephants, all of which had lost their mothers between one and 19 years earlier. They also studied 12 non-orphaned elephants of similar ages.
Parallels between humans and elephants
Some amazing parallels between humans and elephants are also highlighted in the study, in terms of certain physiological signs of stress.
Research, carried out more than a decade ago into AIDS-orphaned children in South Africa, revealed that it is less likely for orphaned children who had a strong level of social support from family and peers to develop post traumatic stress disorder, one symptom of which is abnormal stress hormone levels.
"And what we seem to find in elephants is that those with their family and social support maintain more normal [stress hormone] levels in the long term," explained Parker.
"I just think it's really cool that such a social animal has evolved so separately from humans, and that we still seem to converge on how important social ties are."
As avid conservationists here in The Elephant Foundation, we urge the public to think about this crucial social structure. This intricate elephant-to-elephant support system could help them to adapt to the myriad other threats they face. They too, deserve a life of love, safety, and joy.
Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62165978
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03574-8