The loss of wise old elephant matriarchs, favored targets of African poachers, wipes out important herd memory and severely cripples the efforts of elephant families to find food and raise young, a study shows. Elephants may live more than 50 years and generally live in small family groups led by an older female. A new study shows that these family groups depend heavily upon the memory the aged leader to make wise choices about when to ignore elephants from other herds and when to form defensive huddles against suspicious strangers. Efficiently identifying elephants who are allies and those who might be unfriendly means that a pachyderm family has more time to search for food, rest and to care for their young, say researchers in a study appearing Friday in the journal Science. Experts said the study gives important new understanding to the severe effect poaching of the largest and oldest animals in a herd can have on elephants and other endangered species.
Older elephants have larger tusks of ivory, the principal target of poachers.
In the study, researchers led by Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, studied 20 family groups of elephants in the Amboseli, a wildlife preserve in Kenya. They found that a single family unit, during the course of a year, could encounter about 25 other family units and interact with about 175 female adult elephants. Female adults are the ones most likely to start disputes or to harass young calves in another herd, the authors said. To protect against this, a family will form a defensive circle, protecting the young in the middle. Allies, however, the family will ignore.