6 November 2021 | New Scientist | 43the fingers of one hand. For cetaceans, there is
a book called The Cultural Lives of Whales and
Dolphins. For chimpanzees, says Whiten, the
most comprehensive one is probably another
book called Chimpanzee Behavior in the Wild.
And now there is the Elephant Ethogram.
This new lexicon is in a different league.
It is the first online database for a big-brained
animal – a format that lends itself easily to
updating, which is useful if you are interested
in behavioural change – and it is searchable.
It contains 425 behaviours, illustrated with
some 3000 annotated video clips, audio
recordings and photographs, and draws
on scientific papers dating back more than
a century. Despite its unprecedented detail
and scope, it is very much a work in progress.
Poole and Granli hope that other scientists
will contribute to it as time goes on. For now,
though, it only covers African savannah
elephants from Gorongosa and two other
sites – Kenya’s Maasai Mara ecosystem
and Amboseli National Park.Human-like behaviour
Already, to plunge into the ethogram is to
discover the astonishing range and flexibility
of elephant behaviour. You soon realise that
context matters, with the same behaviour
meaning different things in different settings.
Take tail swatting. When forcefully applied,
it often means “keep your distance”, whereas
from a mother to her calf, it says: “Are you
there baby?” It can even signal appeasement,
says Poole, pointing to the example of Qaskasi,
a young female in Amboseli. Adolescent
female elephants play an important role
in helping to care for the young of older
females, but their efforts aren’t always
welcome. Videos show the matriarch Qoral
repeatedly pushing Qaskasi away from her
newborn. Then, after the hapless Qaskasi has
fallen on the calf, she tries to make amends
by gently tail swatting a ruffled Qoral.
You may think this story has echoes of
human behaviour, and it isn’t the only one.
In another clip, a male named Icarus approaches
his human observers with a swagger. This
behaviour, called a musth-walk, is typical of
males in musth, when they have a heightened
sex drive. Like Icarus, they are essentially
strutting their stuff in front of potential mates.
Those aren’t Poole’s words, but she isn’t >A
HERD of around 40 elephants
processes across open grassland in
Mozambique’s Gorongosa National
Park. Led by a matriarch named Valente,
they are headed towards a newly felled tree,
a potential food source. The tree is out of sight:
perhaps the elephants detected vibrations
from the impact through their feet. That’s
cool, and the procession is impressive – but
elephant scientist Joyce Poole isn’t sure why
this particular video went viral. Since May,
she and her husband Petter Granli have been
posting clips of elephants daily on social
media, and others are far cuter or odder.
The duo are co-founders of a US-based
non-profit organisation called ElephantVoices,
and these videos are part of a project they have
been working on for the past five years. Called
the Elephant Ethogram, it is a freely available
online library of elephant behaviours and
vocalisations, along with their meanings.
Since it went live, Poole and Granli have
been inundated with messages expressing
wonder and gratitude.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The
human desire to decipher other animals
is ancient, and science has recently brought
that dream closer – through, for example,
the use of artificial intelligence to start
decoding the vocalisations of whales
and birds. The Elephant Ethogram is less
flashy, but far more impressive. Andrew
Whiten, who studies animal behaviour at
the University of St Andrews, UK, calls it
a “staggering achievement”. It is probably
the most ambitious ethogram ever created.
As well as giving anyone the pleasure of
understanding elephants more intimately,
it could transform the way researchers see
these magnificent animals – and even help
avert their extinction.
You can think of an ethogram as a foreign-
language dictionary for an entire species that
covers actions as well as sounds. The concept
dates back to the mid-20th century, when
pioneering ethologists like Nikolaas Tinbergen
and Konrad Lorenz drew up the first ones for
species whose behaviour they thought of as
innate and stereotypical – mainly insects, birds
and fish. Several now exist for the mouse, that
staple of laboratory research. But intelligent,
socially complex animals represent a much
greater challenge, and you can count the
number of ethograms that cover them onA young male tosses
his head, advertising
that he is in musth,
a period of increased
sex drive