‘Move away’ and ‘stop that!’: Wild elephants use a rich gestural repertoire intentionally to “mean business”
Elephants check whether others are paying attention, wait for a response and persist with further gestures when their apparent goal is not met
image:
The male elephant on the right performs an Ear Flap to the other male on the left.
view moreCredit: Credit: Vesta Eleuteri
The study, published in Animal Cognition, is the first systematic investigation of intentional gestural communication in wild African savannah elephants. Researchers observed elephants in competitive contexts in Addo Elephant National Park and Marakele National Park in South Africa, carrying out more than 90 hours of observation and recording around 840 individual gesture instances.
The researchers found that elephants were gesturing intentionally in a recipient-directed and goal-directed way. They visually checked whether another elephant was attending to them before and during gesturing, adapted their gesture modality according to the recipient’s visual attention, waited for a response, and produced further gestures when the recipient did not respond in a way that satisfied their apparent goal.
Dr Lucy Bates from the University of Portsmouth, co-author of the study, said: "Tracking and understanding that communication is not easy - it takes a lot of painstaking work. So, to have identified so many different gesture types - as ways of communicating clear messages to 'move away', or ‘stop what you are doing’ - is really exciting. We humans use gesture all the time to get our meaning across to people we are talking to. Knowing that elephants also use these signals to communicate with each other suggests gesturing could be a feature of highly intelligent animals that have complex social lives.”
Vesta Eleuteri from the University of Vienna, lead author of the study, said: “If you spend time observing wild elephants, you can’t help but notice their conspicuous gestures. They may fling their trunk or spread their ears wide, and you intuitively understand that ‘they mean business’. But until now, we didn’t know whether wild elephants were using these gestures to communicate intentionally.
Here we find for the first time that, in competitive situations, wild elephants use intentionally over 40 different gesture types made up of 32 gesture actions to achieve two main goals. They ask their recipients to ‘Move away’ or ‘Stop what they’re doing’.”
Of the 33 gesture types recorded in successful communications, 21 (64 per cent) were used for both meanings, suggesting that elephants do not rigidly use gestures with a single goal, but rather communicate flexibly.
Vesta Eleuteri added: "Such extensive, flexible gestural repertoires have previously been shown in apes and a few other primates. Finding the same in elephants is particularly exciting because elephants are so evolutionarily distant from primates. It suggests that sophisticated gestural communication may have evolved convergently in species that share advanced intelligence and complex social lives."
The study compared the gestures used by two South African populations and their findings with the ElephantVoices database based on observations from populations in Kenya and Mozambique.
Vesta said: “The populations shared the same gesture types, suggesting that elephants may share a common gestural ‘vocabulary’ across populations”.
The researchers say the findings provide a foundation for understanding intentional gestural communication in wild elephants and highlight the need for further research into how elephants use gestures in other contexts.
Prof Angela Stoeger from the University of Vienna, senior author of the study who mainly studies vocal communication in elephants said: These findings underscore why studying multiple modalities is essential. In the future, studying the interplay of acoustic, visual, tactile, and seismic signals, together with context, will finally reveal their messages".
Elephants face several conservation challenges, including habitat loss leading to conflict with humans. The findings carry conservation implications.
Dr Bates concludes: “This work is important because humans and elephants increasingly come into contact with each other, as human populations expand in elephant range-states. Understanding how elephants communicate when they’re feeling threatened could help us better read their intentions or recognise when they don’t want us around, giving us the chance to move away before interactions become dangerous”.
Journal
Animal Cognition
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Elephant gestural communication during agonistic interactions: repertoire, intentionality, and goals
The male elephant on the right performs an Ear Flap to the younger male on the left.
Credit
Credit: Vesta Eleuteri
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