These are truly amazing creatures and their intelligence should not come as a huge surprise to anyone.
We know whales and dolphins are remarkably intelligent so why not these majestic mammals?
Dr. Seuss had it right: Horton really does hear a Who. Wild elephants can distinguish between human languages, and they can tell whether a voice comes from a man, woman or boy, a new study says.
That's what researchers found when they played recordings of
people for elephants in Kenya. Scientists say this is an advanced thinking skill
that other animals haven't shown. It lets elephants figure out who is a threat
and who isn't.
The result shows that while humans are studying elephants, the
clever animals are also studying people and drawing on their famed powers of
memory, said study author Karen McComb.
"Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the
humans that they share their habitat with," said McComb , a professor of animal
behavior and cognition at the University of Sussex in England.
"Memory is key. They must build up that knowledge
somehow."
The study was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
It's close but not quite like the Dr. Seuss book, where the
empathetic elephant Horton hears something that others can't hear.
McComb and colleagues went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya,
where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans, sometimes coming in conflict
over scarce water. The scientists used voice recordings of Maasai men, who on
occasion kill elephants in confrontations over grazing for cattle, and Kamba
men, who are less of a threat to the elephants. The recordings contained the
same phrase in two different languages: "Look over there. A group of elephants
is coming."
By about a two-to-one margin, the elephants reacted defensively —
retreating and gathering in a bunch — more to the Maasai language recording
because it was associated with the more threatening human tribe, said study
co-author Graeme Shannon of Colorado State University.
"They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human
language skills," Shannon said. "They're able to acquire quite detailed
knowledge. The only way of doing this is with an exceptionally large
brain."
They repeated the experiment with recordings of Maasai men and
women. Since women almost never spear elephants, the animals reacted less to the
women's voices. The same thing happened when they substituted young boys'
voices.
"Making this kind of fine distinctions in human voice patterns is
quite remarkable," said Emory University animal cognition expert Frans de Waal,
who was not part of the study.
While it shows quite a bit about elephant intelligence and
adaptability, it also indicates a problem, said biologist Josh Plotnik, founder
of Think Elephants International, a research and advocacy group.
"This is both fascinating in that it supports evidence we already
have that these animals are behaviorally quite flexible, but also sad because it
suggests that the conflict between humans and elephants is growing," Plotnik,
who was not part of the study, wrote in an email.
In yet another experiment McComb and Shannon altered female and
male voices, making female voices sound male by lowering their tone and
resonance, and males sound female by raising their pitches.
Those kinds of
changes fool most humans, but the clever elephants weren't tricked, McComb said.
They still moved away from the altered male voices and not the altered female
voices.
By SETH BORENSTEIN
With thanks to Yahoo
News
I like the music with the You Tube clip also ☺
