72 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020
Sateesh
Venkatesh at
the National
Zoo. Venkatesh
spends much
of his time in
Myanmar, ad-
ministering the
PVC pipe test he
designed.ALLISONSHEL
LEY^ (3 )Spike, left, and
Maharani fi nd
diff erent ways to
get apples out of
a pipe. The test
was designed
to incorporate
things elephants
do in the wild—
like stripping
bark—but be
novel enough to
test their interest
in new objects.of West Virginia, which has fewer than 2 million
residents; Sri Lanka has close to 22 million. In other
words, elephants in Sri Lanka don’t have much room
to wander. Lands they once inhabited have yielded
to towns, farms and orchards.
This means humans and elephants are increasing-
ly in confl ict. Elephants normally graze in the for-
est, working hard to fuel their enormous herbivore
bodies with grass, bark, roots and leaves. But when
they fi nd a fi eld of bananas or sugar cane, they hit
pay dirt. Farmers throughout Asia often face heavy
fi nancial losses after elephants discover a crop.
Sometimes the confl ict turns violent. In Sri Lanka,
elephants killed around 100 people in 2019. In India,
elephant encounters over the past four years have
killed more than 1,700 people.
It all comes down to this riddle: How can an enor-
mous animal keep thriving on a continent where
space is only getting scarcer? The answer might lie
in understanding the elephants themselves, not
just as a species but as individuals. What makes one
elephant raid a crop fi eld while another stays far
away? What are the driving forces behind elephant
social groupings? How do bold and demure person-
ality types function in a cohort? Scientists are just
starting to explore these questions. But our ability
to match wits with the largest-brained land animal
might be our best hope for helping it survive.SOMEWHERE IN ASIA, a scene unfolds on a hot
July night, as captured by an infrared camera: An
elephant, looking pale white on the screen, walks to-
ward a sugar cane fi eld through swarms of insects.
Its feet are so thickly padded that its approach is
stealthy and silent. When the top of its trunk hits the
electrifi ed wire at the edge of the fi eld, it feels the
shock and recoils. Then it pauses and seems to make
a decision. It lifts its giant foot and stomps the wire
to the ground.
On another night, another elephant comes over to
a fence and, with the ease of a practiced locksmith,
wraps its trunk around the wooden post holding
the electric wire in place. It pulls the post out of the
ground, throws it down and steps over the wire into
the sugar cane paradise on the other side.TO SEE Spike and Maharani take a test at the
National Zoo, go to Smithsonianmag.com/elephant