Presented by Lesley Evans Ogden for BBC
Popular culture has painted male African elephants as aggressive, anti-social loners. But are they really the solitary beasts we’ve imagined, or are they just misunderstood?
Raised from birth in a female-dominated world of mothers and maternal helpers, males leave their birth families as teenagers. But what happens next? Where do these independent teenagers go, what do they do, and whom do they learn from?
Over the years researchers have filled in those gaps, and it turns out we have misjudged male African elephants. There’s no question that male elephants can be aggressive, hormone–driven killers. But they can also have friendships, and be both leaders and patient teachers.
The soulful gaze of a male African elephant (Credit: Nature Picture Library / Alamy)
The soulful gaze of a male African elephant (Credit: Nature Picture Library / Alamy)
When it comes to African elephants, “I think people often consider male behaviour less interesting,” says Patrick Chiyo of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Males are also more difficult to study, he says, because they are not constrained by slow-moving babies and so can range more widely.
Prior to Chiyo’s work on males, “there wasn’t very much known beyond some studies in Amboseli [in Kenya], but there was a lot assumed,” says his former supervisor Susan Alberts of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.