If you want to sort animals by intelligence and IQ, elephants tend to be at the top of this list. Aristotle once described the elephant as an animal that "surpasses all other animals in intelligence and thought"; modern ethologists of animal behavior also generally agree that the elephant is one of the most intelligent animals...
Why do everyone think that elephants have a high IQ? Is it because they emit infrasound waves? Or because they can play with their noses? In fact, these are not the main reasons. With existing animal behavior studies, perhaps we can find out these problems.
Super long-term memory
Elephants are most amazing about their memory: they can remember something for long periods of time, even for decades. So much so that in English, praising a person for having a good memory will say, "You have an elephant-like memory!" (have a memory like an elephant), or describe yourself as an elephant never forgets.
Source: unsplash
Elephants make the most of their ability to remember long-term to adapt to difficult circumstances. As a group animal of a matriarchal society, elephants are generally led by older female elephants to lead other mother elephants and baby elephants to live together, and this "matriarch" can always rely on her decades of accumulated memories to find a suitable habitat for the group.
Surveys have found that although a pond in a desert only appears every 8 months, in the absence of water, a herd of elephants led by a "matriarch" in her thirties can always find this "remote" pond without hesitation and timing. In contrast, because of poaching, only young "patriarchal" elephants are left, often unable to find suitable habitats, lack adequate forage or water, resulting in a death rate that more than doubles compared to other elephant herds.
In addition, long-term memories are reflected in the social relations of the elephant herd. Male elephants need to live independently as adults, but they identify individuals through urine and remember the smell of their mothers for decades to avoid inbreeding and unhealthy offspring.
Not only smells, elephants are also very sensitive to sound. Elephants that communicate with each other through infrasound waves can accurately identify the differences of hundreds of elephants within a kilometer radius in different and mixed sound wave frequencies, and find their own familiar sounds. For example, it's as difficult to find your classmates in a school where the playground is packed.
Self-awareness like people
In addition to the miraculous long-term memory, the intelligence of elephants has gradually been revealed under the exploration of animal behaviorists.
One of the most concerned issues for researchers about intelligence is self-awareness. The so-called self-awareness is "Can I know that I am me?" " question. To put it more simply: Will an elephant look in the mirror?
This is because self-awareness is detected through the "Mirror Test": the researcher will make a mark in the place where the person or animal can't see itself, and then ask the person to look in the mirror - if the person will actively try to erase the mark, it means that the person in the mirror is himself, that is, there is a certain sense of self; but if he does not know, he will think that there is another person or animal in the mirror, and he will not pay attention to the mark on his body.
At present, most animals do not pass the "mirror test" | Image source: animalcognition.org
Current research shows that 18-month-old human babies, bottlenose dolphins, and chimpanzees can recognize themselves in the mirror, so what other animal is self-aware? The researchers turned their attention to the clever elephants.
But unlike other animals, large elephants need a mirror large enough to freely examine the structure of the mirror to determine if the "elephant" in the mirror is not real. To this end, the researchers prepared a 2.5-meter-high oversized mirror, and drew a very obvious white fork as a marker next to the elephant's own invisible eyes to see if the elephant could complete the "mirror test".
Schematic diagram of the installed mirror | Source: Plotnik J M, et al. 2006.
Happy the Elephant was really "full of doubts" when she first saw this mirror: she went straight to the mirror and looked at it for ten seconds, then looked back and forth several times, and after repeated confirmation, she began to "touch" the marked position with her nose - "mirror test" was successful!
It can be observed that Happy repeatedly touches the mark around the eye | Source: Plotnik J M, et al. 2006.
The elephants Maxine and Patty then entered the yard in turn for testing, and although they "touched" the marker relatively less often, it still showed that the elephant was a self-aware creature.
No less than a person's problem-solving ability
In order to test how smart the elephants are, the researchers also designed various experiments for them, such as "cooperative experiments" and "counting experiments" and so on.
The "cooperative experiment" is to test whether elephants can cooperate with each other. The researchers designed a net-enclosed tray filled with elephants' favorite meals (see image below). But only one elephant can't pull the tray, because the rope will slide down the pulley, and only two elephants can pull the rope together to eat a big meal.
The Collaborative Experiment design drawing | Source: Plotnik J M, et al. 2011.
In the beginning, the trainer will direct the two elephants to walk together to the rope, so the elephants will cooperate smoothly and the success rate will be very high. But then the two elephants reached the edge of the rope in time: this meant that when one elephant reached the edge of the rope, it had to wait for the other elephant to come and pull the rope, otherwise it would not be able to eat a big meal.
After a day of study, several elephants quickly learned to cooperate and reached the success rate of the last experiment. But an elephant code-named NU not only learned to cooperate, but also learned to be "lazy", which made the scientists on the scene dumbfounded: she would step on the rope with one foot when she went to the rope, and when her companion came, she would rely on her companion to pull the food over, and she would "sit back and enjoy it". This is a path that scientists never envisioned when designing experiments.
You can see that only the elephant above is struggling, NU you are really a lazy little expert |! Source: Plotnik J M, et al. 2011.
As for the "counting" experiment, it is to put two buckets in front of the elephants and randomly throw apples into them, they can only see the process of the apples being thrown in, and they can't see the situation in the buckets, which means that they have to count the number of apples in their minds at all times. As a result, elephants accurately picked more barrels of apples in 74% of cases, and the best Ashya received the highest score of 89% accuracy.
The correct rate of the elephants in the "count" experiment
| 图源:Irie-Sugimoto N, et al. 2009.
In addition to the small problems designed by these scientists, elephants are also a small expert in solving problems in their daily lives. It was observed that in Kenya's Mount Elgon National Park, there is a group of elephants who always like to run into caves, and scientists don't understand: African elephants generally only live on the grassland, how can they still run into the cave? Unexpectedly, they went mining!
The elephants in the cave | Image source: amusingplanet.com
Many animals lick salty ore to replenish their salt, while elephants are even more crisp, choosing to use their sturdy tusks to smash the salty ore off the cave and chew and swallow it to replenish the salt of their bodies.
The survey also found that they had a particularly large appetite: a young male elephant could eat 14 to 20 kilograms of salty soil in 45 minutes, so much so that the researchers also found that the caves here were actually dug up by elephants themselves for thousands of years.
Ivory marks left on the ore | See watermark for the source
Why do we study elephant intelligence?
When you see this, you wonder: Why do scientists go to such great lengths to design experiments to observe elephants and test how smart they are?
The main reason, of course, is to explore the scientific question: are there any other highly intelligent creatures besides humans, who are superior in intelligence? What are the differences between their cognitive behavioral abilities and those of people? How did human intelligence come about? How did this intelligence or consciousness evolve? These questions are still unknown, and scientists may be able to find out the answers through the exploration of chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants.
However, there is another crucial reason: the hunting of elephants. In the past, the pursuit of ivory or the invasion of villages by elephants led to the mass hunting of wild elephants.
However, through the research and observation just mentioned, we also know that the elephant herd that has lost its elderly patriarch will no longer be able to find the pool of water in the desert, and the mortality rate will be greatly increased; the elephants that have lost their tusks will no longer be able to "mine" to replenish salt; and more importantly, we have found that elephants will also have "seven passions and six desires", and they are as intelligent as we are.
That's why, even though the migrating elephants in Yunnan have caused millions of economic losses, they are still well protected by us: they have wisdom and emotions that we may not know, and they are one of the thousands of intelligent beings on this planet, so what reason do we have to hurt them?
Resources
Hart B, Hart L A. Evolution of the elephant brain: a paradox between brain size and cognitive behavior[M]//Evolution of nervous systems. Elsevier Inc., 2010: 491-497.
Plotnik J M, De Waal F B M, Reiss D. Self-recognition in an Asian elephant[J]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2006, 103(45): 17053-17057.
Plotnik J M, Lair R, Suphachoksahakun W, et al. Elephants know when they need a helping trunk in a cooperative task[J]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011, 108(12): 5116-5121.
Irie-Sugimoto N, Kobayashi T, Sato T, et al. Relative quantity judgment by Asian elephants (Elephas maximus)[J]. Animal cognition, 2009, 12(1): 193-199.
Bowell R J, Warren A, Redmond I. Formation of cave salts and utilization by elephants in the Mount Elgon region, Kenya[J]. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 1996, 113(1): 63-79.
Source: biokiwi
Edited by: Dogcraft, yrLewis