Author: Liu Dongli (Writer, Former President and Editor-in-Chief of China Forestry Publishing House)
In March 2020, an "elephant tour group" of 15 Asian elephants in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, migrated northward, which once attracted the keen attention of the media in various countries. Under the careful care and full promotion of the relevant departments, the "Broken Nose Family" finally returned to the old garden on August 8, 2021. Fast forward a year, and on August 12, World Elephant Day, let us once again turn our attention to elephants and think about how humans get along with elephants and with nature.
"The Elder"
The head stood for a long time, motionless, staring into the distance. Time passes in different ways, an hour like a day, a day like a season, a season like a lifetime. In its pupils, in the distance where the vegetation was sparse, the traces of heavy rain were as obvious as an oasis in the desert. The head elephant plays the role of an "elder" who finds an oasis and guides the direction for the entire herd.
The year was 1993, when Tanzania's Tarangire National Park suffered a drought rarely seen in half a century. In less than a year, more than a dozen of the nearly 100 juvenile elephants in the three elephant herds died tragically, and the mortality rate was 10 times that of normal years.
But the researchers found something else: The three herds had different encounters. One herd lost 10 juvenile elephants, while the other two lost little.
It turns out that it was the different choices they made in the face of drought that led to different fates. The two luckiest herds of elephants left their original places of residence in search of new water sources and food. Where they arrived, there were a lot of new green plants, and there were many mud swamps and puddles. The elephant herds, which had suffered heavy losses, had to silently accept the harsh majesty of nature because they did not have the courage to go away (even if they left, it was not easy to find the water source in the desert).
Why do they make different choices? The researchers' eyes were finally focused on the head elephant.
Just over 30 years ago, Tarangire Park experienced a severe drought. However, none of the elephants in this herd who failed to get out of the predicament were old enough to remember or even experience the disasters of that year. The fierce memory of survival, obviously not deeply carved into their bones and blood. The two elephants who left the same place, the heads of which were 38 and 45 years old, respectively— had unforgettable memories of the drought in the past — even though they were only juvenile baby elephants. Elephants have an amazing memory: they can remember something for a long time, even for decades. The dry and terrifying memories are even more enduring, driving them to plan ahead, act decisively, and finally save the lives of the entire herd.
Beneath a small patch of jungle, rare rainwater seeps into the roots of the trees, after which there is no trace. In normal years, a water source somewhere in the desert may appear only every 8 months. In Africa, where water is scarce, a herd of elephants led by "elders" in their thirties and forties has traveled around long distances and arduous journeys, and finally can always find some life-saving pond. In contrast, herds of elephants left with only young chiefs due to poaching or accidental death often find habitats with sufficient forage or water, leading to a sharp rise in mortality.
In the intergenerational transformation of elephants, in various activities such as exploring the environment, fighting, defense, socializing, appeasing, breeding, and playing, there is a mysterious flow and inheritance of indigenous ecological knowledge - they can remember the location of food, water and minerals with high accuracy, and it is the head elephant that plays the role of "elephant herd scholars" and the master of ecological knowledge of the elephant herd. So Aristotle once described the elephant as an animal that "surpasses all other animals in wisdom and thought"; Modern ethologists therefore consider elephants to be among the most intelligent animals.
When the elephant herd enters the unpredictable territory, the female head elephant or the elder male elephant walks in front of the herd. Elderly elephants who have been through a long period of time are very sensitive and cautious, and instinctively warn of danger before encountering danger. They know the importance of keeping their distance from humans. They have seen a large number of relatives whose heads have been cut off and their tusks have been plundered, and although they do not know it, they still realize that humans like ivory.
Among terrestrial mammals, elephants have the heaviest brains and an astonishing number of neurons. Humans have about 0.5% of neurons distributed in the hippocampus, and elephants have 0.7%, which shows that the intellectual activity of elephants exceeds human imagination. Therefore, even if it is a severe drought that occurs once in decades, as long as there are enough elderly elephants in the group, it can lead the younger generations along the route of many years ago, through arduous trekking, and finally regain a new life.
Mysterious communication
The elephant's spine is like an arched bridge, very cleverly supporting the weight of the body. These tons of behemoths actually walk on tiptoes.
Elephants run very fast. We have the impression that they are slow to move, they can't run, and at best they can only walk fast. But in fact, their travel speed can easily reach 24 kilometers per hour; At its fastest speed, it can even reach 30 kilometers per hour.
The elephant's limbs are as thick as a cylinder, and there is a very elastic sponge pad in the soles of the feet, which can effectively reduce the impact of walking. This "shock absorber" makes the elephant walk as silently as a feline. In the foggy jungle, they often appear silently behind people, giving people the illusion of sudden arrival, invisibly adding a more compelling aura.
In addition to vibration absorption, the sponge pad on the sole of the foot can also be keenly perceived by ground vibrations. Through infrasound waves, elephants can deliver messages to their companions 30 kilometers away. For example, if a companion has been out of contact for a long time, they will signal the companion by stomping their feet. And its companions can actually use their feet to "listen" to distant signals, and if the sound comes from their own elephant herd, it will respond.
Elephants can also make dozens of different calls, sometimes screaming high, sometimes low and depressed. Scientists observed twenty years ago that elephants make a low-frequency sound that communicates with their companions a few kilometers away. These low-frequency sound waves, or infrasound waves, that they emit from their throats can travel far, although they cannot be captured by the human ear.
In the chaotic and interfering sound frequencies, elephants can also accurately distinguish the differences between hundreds of companions within a kilometer radius, and accurately identify the sounds they are most concerned about. If it is a familiar voice, the elephant group will generally be emotional as usual. But if the sound is different, they usually become alert immediately, gather together, agitate obviously, and sometimes even collectively rush to the source of the sound to find out.
With extraordinary hearing, the sound of thunderstorms outside the line of sight will be absorbed by them.
The elephant is large, but it also has a lot of buoyancy, and it can easily cross wide and fast-flowing rivers. In some places, elephants can even swim on shallow seas. At this point, the elephant trunk plays another logical function - when completely submerged below the surface of the water, it can breathe through the nose.
Compared with Asian elephants, wild elephants living in Africa spend more time sleeping standing during migration because standing up can react faster in times of crisis. In order to ensure safety, members of the elephant herd will also implement a system of sleeping in turn, taking turns to stand guard, and at the slightest sign of danger, they will show the police.
"Elephant Map"
Running in the wilderness and desert, the elephant herd is just passively adapting to the environment, walking as they go, obstinately going their own way, and exerting the unenguageable wildness, freedom and energy released by the instinct of survival in nature. They travel through dense forests, over mountains and mountains like flat land, and their migration ability is staggering.
Elephants have an IQ equivalent to that of human children aged 6 to 8 years old, and they can accurately remember the location of food and water sources over a large area. They have a unique ability to think, memory is their map, experience is their wisdom.
During the long journeys, the elephant herd often had to cross the swamps. Many dexterous animals see the swamp as a terrible burial place, and how did the huge elephant achieve such a flat foot?
In fact, elephants can create "signposts" that belong to their own ethnic groups.
As each group of elephants crosses the swamp, they use their trunks to make a significant damage to the branches and leaves on one side of the trees along the way. So in the dangerous swamp, there is often a row of trees, with lush foliage on one side and almost no branches and leaves on the other. Walking along such a bush can avoid many dangerous quagmire.
Birds, fish, and amphibians can all navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field, shaped like a giant magnet rod placed in the center of the Earth, with both ends of the iron rod pointing roughly to the south and north poles. It can both help the animal determine the direction of its own movement and help the animal to locate it precisely.
In 2020, when the "broken nose family" went north, some scholars proposed that these Asian elephants went all the way north, and it may be that the migratory instinct imprinted in their genes was accidentally stimulated, which may be related to solar activity. In fact, the time when the elephant herd began to move north coincided with the time of solar storms and geomagnetic storms.
For the elephant herd, as long as it is the route they travel, the pond they have played, and the water source they have used, they will be clearly imprinted in their minds. Their sense of geography, thanks to the experience passed down from generation to generation, the migration route will become an "elephant map" in the mind, passed down from generation to generation.
camaraderie
Elephants are a very social animal. They are naïve and extremely intelligent, such as hiding teeth, serving noses, weeping, mourning females, etc., and these habits all show a high spirituality. They have communication with people, can understand people's intentions, and also have the consciousness of knowing gratitude.
Elephants, like people, have their own lingering sad memories. Human elephant breeders sometimes sleep next to baby elephants, and when they shout in their dreams, the comfort of the elephant breeders makes them feel like they are sleeping next to the mother elephant. There is an orphan elephant in Africa, and after nearly 40 years of separation, it is easy to recognize its own infant elephant breeder.
Daphne, a researcher who studies African elephants in Kenya, once adopted a 3-week-old baby elephant and temporarily acted as its "mother", taking good care of it for 6 months. However, within 10 days of Daphne's brief absence, the baby elephant unexpectedly went on a hunger strike and died. Daphne was so shocked that she came to a sad conclusion: "When a baby elephant is too dependent on someone, that dependence becomes a matter of life and death." ”
Lawrence Anthony, the founder of Earth, had a similar experience, once visiting an elephant herd with his wife, Catherine, and his newborn child Vega. Anthony had a sudden whim and held up his child to show the head. Only to see the head elephant "turn around and disappear into the bushes, and soon reappear, surrounded by her newborn child." She also came to show me her offspring. I'm a scientist, but it's something I can't explain for a long time—it's like a magical moment. At that moment there was a special connection between us. ”
Experts have studied the "interactions" of elephants with humans at Knysna Elephant Park in the Western Cape, South Africa, and concluded that although their wild temperament has never changed through selective breeding, and although most wild elephants today are difficult to control and domesticate, in general, elephants who have been tamed from an early age can easily form close relationships with breeders and prioritize interaction with humans who have greater kindness to them. While elephants may still have an unpredictable side to their reactions to humans, it can be seen that once they form some kind of warm and intimate connection with humans, they value such associations and can even become babysitters for human babies.
As for other elephants living in the wilderness, they are still hostile to humans, but when they decide that humans will not harm them, they trust humans and are willing to take the initiative to come to the vicinity of human camps and drink water to forage for food without causing damage to the surrounding environment. Some elephants even have the urge to protect their "human friends", stopping other wild elephants or other beasts of prey when they want to harm humans. For example, in China, when the ancestors of the Dai people had just migrated to the banks of the Lancang River, green bamboo and plantains would be planted next to the newly opened villages to lure elephants to eat. As soon as the elephants arrive, the tiger and leopard with their teeth and claws will retreat.
Traumatic memories
Although the elephant's benevolence and meekness are well known, this does not mean that it is a submissive character. If man and elephant meet head-on in the jungle, and both sides are caught off guard, there may be a situation of fighting for their lives. If a member is killed, they retaliate en masse. Modern biologists believe that elephants are one of the few animals that exhibits the characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder, with symptoms such as abnormal responses, unpredictable behavior, increased aggression, and indiscriminate destructive behaviors such as lifting houses and overturning trees.
In the West, there are many accounts of elephant revenge. The story of a Mexican Tamer with an elephant named Jumbo who killed the tamer Torrez years later sounds like a novel, but it is a real event that happened more than 20 years ago.
Torrez was an alcoholic and cruel man for many years, and when he tamed elephants, he often beat animals with pointed sticks and electric batons, and treasures were also deeply affected. Later, Torrez finally retired, and the animals were given a period of calmer time. Once, however, when Torrez occasionally appeared in the Taming of the Beast, he instantly evoked the traumatic memory of the treasure, and it went straight forward and killed him with one foot. People have somewhat understood that under the appearance of Zhenbao's thick and slow appearance, there is actually a sea of extreme pain and anger suppressed. Once the tipping point of psychological endurance is reached, it will burst out.
ethnic group
Even after years of being reduced to bones, African elephants can recognize the smell of their loved ones. When an elephant dies, family members gather around the deceased, some trying to wake it up, and some sowing dirt and leaves on the deceased, and after a long time, the herd will reluctantly leave. This is somewhat similar to human funeral rites.
This ethic of kinship is reflected in many ways in the social relations of elephants. Male elephants generally live independently when they reach adulthood, but they identify individuals through urine and remember the smell of siblings for decades, thus invisibly avoiding inbreeding and producing unhealthy offspring.
After experiencing some unexpected events, such as a wilderness conquest or a competition with another elephant herd, family members often gather together and rub each other. This behavior helps family members to strengthen their feelings and make the family more united. When feeling the uneasiness of other companions, the elephant will touch the head of the companion with the trunk to show comfort.
Young elephants rely entirely on breastfeeding until the age of two, and some are weaned until they are 4 years old. For the first 8 years of its life, it was almost inseparable from the mother elephant. Parent-child education and skills training will continue until the baby elephant grows into its teens, which is almost indistinguishable from humans.
The degree of dependence of young elephants on the mother elephant and the degree of favor in the group are beyond people's imagination. Most baby elephants have multiple aunts as "adoptive mothers", and when the baby elephants encounter difficulties, the mother and adoptive mother will try to help. Which are the signals related to danger, how to find food and water sources in distant places, and what kind of soil salt can be obtained, this is their common teaching content. Baby elephants with more than 3 adoptive mothers are several times more likely to grow up healthily than those without adoptive mothers in environments like zoos.
Extending to the entire elephant herd, we can observe a well-organized matriarchal society.
The leader of the herd is usually the eldest female elephant, and the sisters, cousins, and minor descendants of these relatives will also stay in the same community. They are closely related and loyal to each other. Such a "society" can be imagined as a set of concentric circles that intersect with each other. Each member knows almost all the partners in the group, and the head can even grasp the traces of 30 family members at the same time, so the excellent talent is undoubtedly very conducive to the management of the group.
Elephant herds generally range in size from less than 10 to more than 30, and in some parts of Africa, or on the way to migration, hundreds of elephants from multiple herds sometimes gather together.
Male elephants, on the other hand, wander outside the herd, seemingly carefree and independent as they age. They come and go alone, and they end up at a leisurely pace. However, compared with the mild-mannered elephants, the solo elephants appear to be sensitive and irritable, and are more likely to attack people and animals without warning. Because the elephants have the heavy responsibility of protecting the baby elephants, they generally do not take the initiative to provoke "border challenges". If the elephants clash with humans, they are usually because of the baby elephants.
Of course, when it comes to mating season, the solo elephant may also converge a little "personality" and stay in the group for a short time. At this stage, the target group has a good role in promoting, and these "social elephants" who are wandering outside will play a good disciplinary role in the young male elephants in the group.
It can be seen that elephants are difficult to maintain well in captivity, and once they leave the group and familiar living environment, they will even be depressed for life.
In zoos, for example, elephants are unable to get the necessary amount of exercise and are obese (many captive African elephants are prone to malnutrition). And for the rest of their lives, they have to walk on concrete, resulting in unhealthy joints. Not to mention the psychological need for group life, which is not what humans can give, zoos are far from their ideal home.
Evolution and degeneration
The important information left on the ivory, which comes from the earth, the mother, the mountain forest, is a reliable marker of the elephant's identity, and even if the bones remain, the corresponding identity characteristics are still quite intact. However, ivory was once an important commodity driving maritime trade in Europe, Africa and Asia. After tens of thousands of years of hunting, centuries of ivory industry and 30 years of international poaching and smuggling, elephants are widely protected internationally. But many far-reaching consequences do not mean that you can stop.
Zoologists at Oxford University have found in previous years that the breeding behavior of elephants in larger, longer-tusked adults has changed due to the mass killing of larger, longer-tusk males, and smaller, shorter-tusk males have been able to reproduce more offspring. This trend continues, resulting in a shortening of the average ivory length of African elephants.
Like Darwin's perception, evolution does not necessarily lead to higher things. In fact, there is no distinction between high and low in the path of evolution, but what it is and what it should be ordered to be is its essence, that is, the highest law. However, species generally evolve over thousands of years before obvious evolutionary results occur, but the length of the ivory of African elephants changes significantly, taking only about 150 years.
The consequence of the forced evolution of African elephants stems from poachers hunting elephants for their tusks. Human slaughter of elephants is gradually changing their sexual characteristics and passing them on to their offspring – bull elephants with beautiful tusks are coveted by poachers, and when these bull elephants are slaughtered, female elephants with thick and short tusks begin to be hunted. The female elephants without ivory were lucky enough to survive, but the toothless traits shaped their offspring in a genetic way. As a result, there are more and more baby elephants that no longer have teeth, and they express their willingness to survive from poaching.
Since the mid-19th century, the average length of the tusks of African elephants has been cut in half. In Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, the elephants that have survived and are now old have a characteristic – many of them do not have ivory. The surviving toothless female elephants gave birth to more toothless offspring.
Theoretically, hunters should wait until the elephant naturally dies to obtain the ivory. But when even the smallest ivory can be sold for a high price, the impatient and self-motivated locals have long been unable to resist the temptation of huge profits. The average weight of African ivory has long since dropped from 24 pounds in 1970 to 6 pounds 20 years later. Whether it is a baby elephant or a female elephant, as long as they grow teeth, even if the tusks are small, they will become the object of hunting.
This feels a bit poignant about the "history of advance (retreat)", which does not yet explain all the influences of humans on wild elephants.
As mentioned earlier, elephants can tell their companions their location through sound; The elephant who hears the sound has the ability to distinguish whether the sound originates from an enemy or a friend. However, when researchers played experimental sounds on "orphan elephant herds" who had experienced poaching and culling and the loss of older companions, they were greeted with a variety of disorderly responses. The herd may be alarmed by a familiar voice and flee; It is also possible to be unaware of the noise of danger, deaf and deaf, and completely unaware of how to properly respond to potential threats. The effects of poaching do not cease with the prohibition of poaching, but rather, inappropriate behaviors and reactions, as chaotic genetic instructions, are still passed on silently to the next generation.
When the beast came to man
The news of the northward migration of Asian elephants in March 2020 once attracted the keen attention of the media of various countries, successfully drawing the attention of global viewers to the mountains and forests, allowing us to re-grasp the true appearance of the world in the contemplation of nature. The profound contemplation of the relationship between human beings and Asian elephants also contains human understanding and inquiry into the dream of homeland and the history and future direction of mankind. In the steady and slow footsteps of elephants, the interaction patterns between humans and wild animals are quietly changing.
In Africa, where natives and wild elephants coexist in the same savanna ecosystem, humans and elephants feed back and evolve with each other, often causing each other, and apparently not always by one side simply deciding the other. Some locals live a lot like elephants, living by water and grass. The migration of elephants can provide fertilizer for barren land, attract all kinds of small animals to loosen the soil, have great benefits for faster succession between plants, alleviate desertification, and maintain the genetic diversity of populations. Because most of the plant seeds that elephants eat are not digested, they attract and nourish a large number of insectivorous birds, which grow everywhere with elephant droppings.
Where the elephants pass, they can step out of the elephant road in the dense forest, which provides great convenience for many other animals, so that they have a way to go, and promotes the effective spread of animals; Some species rely on elephant-leveled trees to dig holes for water, while others use the places dug by elephants as their shelter. There is a species of lizard in Africa that prefers to choose trees that have been pushed down by elephants as a habitat. In some rainforest areas of Asia, the footprints of Asian elephants are as warm and lovely as tadpole kindergartens.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche depicts a poetic world in which death and resurrection become symbols of the constant cycle and regeneration of life. The boundary between man and animal no longer exists, the boundary between natural species and human society is opened, and a power that washes away the lead and shocks the heart emerges, which is the rhythm of the heart of nature full of power. There, nature is no longer abstract, but expresses the surging voice of the heart with a surging wave of life. Dionysus, the god of wine, knew the secrets of nature, "and under his magic, not only was there a reconciliation between men, but also an estranged, hostile, enslaved nature re-celebrated the festival of reconciliation between her and her prodigal son, the human race." The earth generously offered its offerings, and the beasts of the precipice and desert came quietly toward mankind. ”
In this way, Chihiro's understanding and imagination of the waterfall is like a tide breaking through the embankment, transcending the inherent cognition of nature and human affairs in the past, and is an abstract reflection on the divinity of nature and the ultimate meaning of life. Looking at the distant background of the elephant swarm, nature presents the most magnificent and amazing beauty, ants and grasshoppers, great masters, thousands of sentient beings, just like in its embrace, and the light and dust.
Guangming Daily (2022.08.12. 13th edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily