Elephants solve problems with personality — ScienceDaily

Cortez Deacetis

Just as individuals have their personal unique personalities, new research in the Journal of Comparative Psychology demonstrates that elephants have personalities, far too. Additionally, an elephant’s temperament may possibly participate in an critical role in how very well that elephant can resolve novel difficulties.

The article was created by Lisa Barrett and Sarah Benson-Amram in the College of Wyoming’s Animal Actions and Cognition Lab, led by Benson-Amram. It could be viewed below.

The authors of the paper tested 15 Asian elephants and 3 African savanna elephants in a few zoos across the country — the San Diego Zoo, the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park and the Oklahoma City Zoo — with the enable of elephant caretakers.

Preceding perform from Barrett and Benson-Amram shown that Asian elephants can use drinking water as a tool to fix a novel dilemma — and access a delicious marshmallow reward — in what is actually known as the floating object activity. This time, the authors developed new novel duties, as perfectly as persona checks, for the elephants.

“We took a thorough solution by making use of a few distinctive dilemma-solving responsibilities and 3 sorts of temperament assessments to figure out if unique persona performed a job in which elephants had been able to clear up these jobs,” Barrett claims. “Due to the fact we could not give the elephants a persona check like the kinds you are acquainted with on line, we had to imagine creatively.”

The authors formulated novel object checks, in which they offered the elephants with an unfamiliar item, a mylar balloon, a burned log and the scent of a predator (lion or hyena), and recorded the elephants’ responses. You can check out video clips of the novel item trials: balloon, burned log and urine. They also questioned elephant caretakers to fill out a study about the personalities of the animals in their treatment and, last but not least, they observed the elephants interacting with a person a different in their zoo habitats.


From those assessments, Barrett and Benson-Amram figured out that the surveys and observations were being the most reliable procedures to get at elephant persona. Over-all, Barrett and Benson-Amram measured traits these as lively, affectionate, aggressive, defiant, excitable, mischievous, shy and sociable, which have been studied in other animals as very well.

“We have been eager to see if the identity features we uncovered through the surveys and observations predicted results on novel challenge-solving tasks,” Benson-Amram says. “The elephants had an chance to clear up each process a few periods, and we measured if they uncovered to solve quicker above time, and then we traced their good results again to their character sort.”

The a few issue-fixing duties integrated the entice tube process, which is a common take a look at used with primates but which had never ever been presented exterior of primates just before. You can look at video clips of the issue-resolving trials: boxed ball, rod ball and entice tube.

Barrett and Benson-Amram located that elephants did master to address two out of the three tasks more rapidly above time, even although the elephants only received a few trials on each process. Features like aggressiveness and activity have been significant predictors of issue-fixing over-all, but the personality qualities calculated did not considerably predict studying ability.

This analyze will make connections between two sources of personal variation, temperament and cognition, in threatened species. One particular rationale it is significant to study difficulty-fixing in elephants is that they are confronted with new complications that they need to solve routinely in the wild. For case in point, if certain attributes permit elephants to triumph over novel issues, elephants may be extra most likely to invade farmland and add to human-elephant conflict. With additional investigation, professionals can forecast which elephants may triumph over or habituate to deterrents, and managers can commit far more resources to tracking elephants.

The authors contact for extra function on distinctive sorts of persona assessments to decide which solutions would be greatest for administration of zoo and wild elephants.

“Exploration with no cost-ranging elephants can lengthen this analyze to figure out which individuality attributes are most significant for solving novel difficulties that elephants working experience in the wild,” says Barrett, a 2020 graduate of UW’s Program in Ecology and the Office of Zoology and Physiology.

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