It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, November 09, 2024
Watch this elephant turn a hose into a sophisticated showering tool
Cell Press
video:
This is a video abstract for the 2024 Current Biology paper on elephant water hose tool use.
Tool use isn’t unique to humans. Chimpanzees use sticks as tools. Dolphins, crows, and elephants are known for their tool-use abilities, too. Now a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 8, 2024, highlights elephants’ remarkable skill in using a hose as a flexible shower head. As an unexpected bonus, researchers say they also have evidence that a fellow elephant knows how to turn the water off, perhaps as a kind of “prank.”
“Elephants are amazing with hoses,” says Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin, one of the senior authors. “As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.”
The researchers made the discovery after the paper’s other senior author Lena Kaufmann (@lena_v_kaufmann), also of Humbolt University of Berlin, witnessed the Asian elephant Mary at the Berlin Zoo showering one day and captured it on film. She took it back to her colleagues who were immediately impressed. First study author Lea Urban decided to analyze the behavior in more detail.
“I had not thought about hoses as tools much before, but what came out from Lea's work is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools,” Brecht says.
The researchers found that Mary systematically showers her body, coordinating the water hose with her limbs. She usually grasps the hose behind its tip to use it as a stiff shower head. To reach her back, she switches to a lasso strategy, grasping the hose farther up and swinging it over her body. When presented with a larger and heavier hose, Mary used her trunk to wash instead of the bulkier and less useful hose.
The researchers say that the findings offer a new example of goal-directed tool use. But what surprised them most was the way fellow Asian elephant Anchali reacted during Mary’s showering.
The two elephants showed aggressive interactions around showering time, the researchers say. At one point, Anchali started pulling the hose toward herself and away from Mary, lifting and kinking it to disrupt water flow. While they can’t be sure of Anchali’s intentions, it looked a lot like the elephant was displaying a kind of second order tool use behavior, disabling a tool in more conventional use by a fellow elephant, perhaps as an act of sabotage.
“The surprise was certainly Anchali's kink-and-clamp behavior,” Brecht says. “Nobody had thought that she'd be smart enough to pull off such a trick.”
In fact, he reports plenty of debate in the lab about Anchali’s behavior and what it meant. Then, they saw Anchali find another way to disrupt Mary’s shower. In this case, Anchali did what the researchers refer to as a trunkstand to stop the water flow. For this feat, Anchali places her trunk on the hose and then lowers her massive body onto it.
Brecht explains that the elephants are well trained not to step on hoses, lest the keepers scold them. As a result, he says, they almost never do that. The researchers suspect that’s why Anchali has come up with more challenging workarounds to stop the water from flowing during Mary’s showers.
“When Anchali came up with a second behavior that disrupted water flow to Mary, I became pretty convinced that she is trying to sabotage Mary,” Brecht said.
The findings come as a reminder of elephants’ extraordinary manipulative skill and tool use, made possible by the grasping ability of their trunks. The researchers say they now wonder what the findings in zoo elephants mean for elephants in their natural environments.
“Do elephants play tricks on each other in the wild?” Brecht asked. “When I saw Anchali's kink and clamp for the first time, I broke out in laughter. So, I wonder, does Anchali also think this is funny, or is she just being mean?”
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This research was funded by the European Research Council.
Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience on November 8 have found that chimpanzees’ performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them. The findings suggest that this “audience effect” predates the development of reputation-based human societies, the researchers say.
“It was very surprising to find that chimpanzees are affected in their task performance by audience members, and by human audience members nonetheless!” says Christen Lin of Kyoto University in Japan. “One might not expect a chimp to particularly care if another species is watching them perform a task, but the fact that they seem to be affected by human audiences even depending on the difficulty of the task suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have initially expected.”
The researchers, including Shinya Yamamoto and Akiho Muramatsu, wanted to find out if the audience effect, often attributed in humans to reputation management, might also exist in a non-human primate. People, they knew, pay attention to who is watching them, sometimes even subconsciously, in ways that affect their performance. While chimps live in hierarchical societies, it wasn’t clear to what extent they, too, might be influenced by those watching them.
“Our study site is special in that chimpanzees frequently interact with and even enjoy the company of humans here, participating almost daily in various touch screen experiments for food rewards,” Muramatsu says. “As such, we saw the opportunity to not only explore potential similarities in audience-related effects but also to do so in the context of chimps that share unique bonds with humans.”
The researchers made the discovery after analyzing thousands of sessions in which chimpanzees completed a touch screen task over six years. They found in three different number-based tasks that chimpanzees performed better on the most difficult task as the number of experimenters watching them increased. In contrast, they also found that, for the easiest task, chimpanzees performed worse when being watched by more experimenters or other familiar people.
The researchers note that it remains unclear what specific mechanisms underlie these audience-related effects, even for humans. They suggest that further study in non-human apes may offer more insight into how this trait evolved and why it developed.
“Our findings suggest that how much humans care about witnesses and audience members may not be quite so specific to our species,” Yamamoto says. “These characteristics are a core part of how our societies are largely based on reputation, and if chimpanzees also pay special attention towards audience members while they perform their tasks, it stands to reason that these audience-based characteristics could have evolved before reputation-based societies emerged in our great ape lineage.”
iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit https://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
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