70 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020
winter morning at Smithsonian’s National
Zoo, I watched two Asian elephants take a test.
The building was still closed to visitors, but about
a dozen zoo staffers were lined up to watch. As
the gate from the outdoor elephant yard lifted,
a keeper admonished everyone to stand farther
back, even though there were bars separating
us from the animals. An elephant’s trunk has
close to 40,000 muscles, and as it’s reaching
out to smell you, it can knock you down fl at.
Spike, a 38-year-old bull, ambled in from the yard. He headed straight for
a 150-pound PVC pipe in the middle of the dusty fl oor, wrapping his trunk
around it and easily lifting it from the ground. Apples had been stuff ed
inside three diff erent compartments, and the task was to get to them. As
Spike held the strange object upright between his tusks, he groped with
his trunk until he found a hole covered with paper in the pipe’s center.
He punched through the paper, pulling out the treat. Then a keeper lured
Spike outdoors and the gate clanked shut.
Next came 29-year-old Maharani, a spring in her step, ears fl apping. She
used another strategy, rolling her pipe around until she found an open-
ing at one end. As she was prying off the lid, Spike’s trunk waved through
the bars, as though he were beckoning Maharani to come closer. Maharani
turned her enormous body around and dragged the pipe along with her,
closer to the gate. Then she munched on her apple where Spike could see,
or smell, it. The human onlookers giggled in appreciation.
“What we’re looking for is individual diff erence in elephants—more or
less, personality,” explained Sateesh Venkatesh, a 32-year-old graduate
student who is researching elephants under the joint supervision of Hunt-
er College and Smithsonian scientists. “Do diff erent elephants react diff er-
ently to a novel object—to something that’s new, that they haven’t seen?
Do they solve the puzzle diff erently? Are some of them bolder? Do they
come straight up to it, pick it up and throw it?”
Elephant research has come a long way since April 1970, when the fi rst
issue of Smithsonian featured an Asian elephant on its cover. That orig-
inal article, by the pioneering zoologist John F. Eisenberg, focused on a
Smithsonian Institution expedition to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. These days,
Smithsonian experts who study Asian elephants are concentrating their
eff orts in Myanmar. Some of their methods are now much more high-tech.
Eisenberg’s team risked their lives to put visual tags on just three ele-
phants. T oday’s scientists have outfi tted dozens of elephants with GPS col-
Ganesh, the el-
ephant-headed
god, is revered
throughout the
Hindu world.
He’s often shown
holding sweets,
or his own bro-
ken tusk.Mahouts fi nish
bathing a group of
elephants at the
Myaing Hay Wun
Camp in Myanmar.
The elephants are
chained during the
day but are allowed
to roam at night.On a recent