Jenny couldn’t calm down. Ever since Shirley arrived, she had been out of her mind. She approached her. Now Shirley was getting upset too. There was pure euphoria. Jenny and Shirley started groping each other. Shirley started to howl. Jenny followed. They explored the scars on each other’s bodies with their assholes. Jenny and Shirley were elephants. “I have never seen anything so intense without aggression,” reported their caretaker. Nothing was clear to her. She knew a little about Jenny, but nothing about the newly welcomed Shirley. A little research revealed that 23 years ago they had spent a few months in the same circus. They had not seen each other since. Now they recognised each other and looked forward to seeing each other as if they had seen each other yesterday. The myth that elephants do not forget anything is not true, but it is quite true that their memory is excellent.
Even though they have poor eyesight, they recognise themselves every time. How? By touch, smell and sound, and that’s how they find each other in crowds. When there are elephants all around, and it’s about as if a family were in a crowded mall, elephants can find as many as 30 of their companions. When they lose one in the vast plains, they try to find it not only by smell, but also by vibration. Their soles are so animated that they can detect the vibrations in the ground, so they know where to go.
Combined with scent, their memory is extremely effective. The researchers placed urine samples in front of the elephants. They sniffed them carefully with their snouts and got upset when they saw a sample that didn’t belong to a member of their family and therefore shouldn’t have been there. They recognised the smell of their family member’s urine regardless of when they last saw or smelled it. They recognise and remember everyone they live with, which is not the case for other animals living in groups.
I know who I am
Along with dolphins, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, elephants are the only animals that recognise their reflection in a mirror, which means they have a form of self-awareness. Researcher Joshua Plotnik put three elephants in front of a giant mirror measuring 2.5 by 2.5 metres. He drew a white X on one cheek and an invisible X on the other. Then the three elephants looked in the mirror while she watched to see whether or not the X would attract them.
In previous attempts, no elephant had noticed it, but then the mirror was small and far away from them, so they had to rely on their poor eyesight and may not have noticed the letter. Now the mirror was large and the elephants were allowed to touch it with their tusks.
One of the elephants is aware of his mark, the other two are not, but only less than half of the monkeys pass this test, and yet they are considered to recognise themselves in the mirror and are therefore self-aware. For Plotnik and his colleagues, the success of one elephant was enough to convince them that the same is true for elephants, but not for some of their colleagues.
They think it is quite possible that the elephant who took the test was interested in the mark on his body, but did not associate it with his own body and therefore did not prove that he recognised himself in the mirror. Recognition in a mirror is a characteristic of animals that are socially closely related to each other. Because they are so intertwined, they probably need to be self-aware in order to distinguish themselves from other animals in the group.
Elephants definitely live in groups, or rather, female elephants live in groups, because elephants reach sexual maturity in their own way, once they reach 14 years of age. They roam around alone or with other single elephants, and only meet female elephants when they are mating. Female elephants stay together. The mother lives with her daughters and granddaughters in a family that can number 12 or more. The family is always headed by the oldest elephant and when she dies, the next oldest elephant succeeds her.
Why is it important that all the family threads are in the hands of the oldest elephant? Because she has the most life experience and can make the best decisions because she has a great memory to draw on. For example, researchers have found that a group led by a 55-year-old elephant is much better at protecting itself from danger than a group led by a younger elephant.
For example, when the unknown elephant appeared, the 55-year-old was better able to organise her family’s defence than her 20-years-younger colleague, because experience had taught her that strangers bring trouble and that strangers endanger the calves, and she was able to draw from memory what was the wisest thing to do in such circumstances.
Similarly, the older elephants did better when the researchers played the howling of lions over the loudspeaker. The older elephants listened longer than the younger ones and were able to distinguish between the voice of lions, which are more prone to killing, and that of lionesses, which are less so. When they recognised the lion, they rallied their ranks more effectively than with the voice of the lioness.
In another study, the voice of a member who had died two years earlier was played over a loudspeaker. The elephants gathered around the loudspeaker and responded to their deceased relative, showing not only their good memory but also their very strong social bonds.
In another study, a female elephant was followed as she moved from one group to another. Her original family continued to respond to her voice 12 years after she left. They had not forgotten her.
Survival depends on memory
Elephants live closely intertwined in the family. They eat, rest and move together. They protect each other and care for their young together. In times of hardship, when water is scarce, for example, they share it together, although this is often not enough to survive. For him, again, it is memory that is decisive.
In 1993, researchers in Tanzania observed three elephant families. This was also a year when the drought was particularly severe. Two of the families were headed by female elephants aged between 38 and 45, while the leader of the third group numbered 33. The older two elephants took their family members out of the reserve, while the younger one stayed with hers.
That year, 16 of the 81 elephant calves, or 20% of the total, died. Normally, only 2% die. Ten of the dead baby elephants belonged to the family of a younger female elephant. She was too young to make wise decisions.
It turns out that the same area was also subject to a severe drought between 1958 and 1961. The two older elephants were old enough to remember what to do in such circumstances. They knew where to take their families when water and food ran out where they lived. The younger elephant was too young for this life experience, which cost the lives of her family members.
Researchers can’t measure exactly how smart elephants are, but they have measured the relationship between the size of their brains and their weight. It turns out that elephants have one of the largest brains of any living creature, weighing around 4.7 kilogrammes, while a human brain weighs only around 1.3 kilogrammes.
The ratio of brain size to weight is in favour of humans: 7 in humans and 1.88 in elephants. Chimpanzees are smarter than elephants with a quotient of 2.5, and pigs are not very bright with only 0.27. Thus, elephants are not only animals with excellent memories, but also some of the smartest animals.
Zoologist Ian Douglas-Hamilton befriended a Tanzanian elephant in the 1960s or early in his career. They were so close that he was able to walk right alongside her in the wild. In 1969, he had to leave to do his PhD. He returned four years later. It was as if he had never left. “She came straight to me and behaved the same way she used to,” he reported.
Elephants are extremely attached, although more to each other than to humans, and this attachment, combined with their excellent memory, is probably the reason why they recognise the skeletons of their family members.
For example, researcher Cynthia Moss brought in the jawbone of a deceased family member and placed it in a spot where her family usually walked by. A few days later, she did indeed walk by. The elephants cautiously approached the jaw. One baby was particularly interested in the jaw. He kept stepping around it even when the other elephants had long since moved on. He was the seven-year-old son of the deceased elephant.
When an elephant’s mother dies or, more likely, is killed by poachers, one of the other elephants in the family takes care of it. They never let the baby down, nor do they forget the deceased.
In another experiment, a piece of wood, ivory, an elephant skull and the skulls of two other animals were placed in front of the elephants. The elephants showed the most interest in the elephant skull and got excited about it, but not about the skulls of the other animals. They were not particularly interested in the wood, but they were attracted to the ivory – they spent six times more time on it than on the wood, which shows that they are highly intelligent, but also emotional.
For example, one elephant kicked dust with its feet on the skeleton of an elephant it found and tried to cover it with leaves, as if to bury it. Nevertheless, the myth of elephant burial grounds is not true. Elephants do not have burial grounds, but their ivory often makes them prey to poachers, so many of their remains are often in one place.
Poachers are not only dangerous to the survival of elephants because they kill them, but also because they usually kill the oldest elephant with the most luxurious ivory. The next oldest elephant then takes over the family, but she is too young to have had enough life experience, so she quickly jeopardises the safety of her family members.
Emotional and compassionate
But elephants look after themselves as best they know how. Emotionally, too. Many animals reconcile after arguments and fights, but do not show compassion or comfort each other. Elephants.
When an elephant is frightened, it usually raises its ears and tail, then howls and makes other noises. Researchers have been looking at what happens when an elephant gets scared. They found that other elephants immediately pick up on its signs of stress, rush over to it and stand by its side. They gently tickle him and touch his head and genitals. Sometimes an elephant will even put its mouth in the mouth of a frightened elephant, which means that it trusts the elephant completely, because the elephant might bite it.
But elephants are really emotional and attentive. For example, one elephant jumped up when a family member approached an electric fence with her trotting tongue. There was no electricity that day, but the elephant remembered well that she had been in one and tried to prevent the accident before it happened.
Like the US Marines, elephants never leave the sick and wounded behind, even if they are not their immediate family. One baby elephant tried his best to revive the dying leader of his family. He tried to lift her to her feet with his rilcer, but to no avail.
A researcher driving in Kenya spotted a female elephant that had just given birth to a stillborn baby elephant. For two days, she guarded the carcass and kept reviving it. During all this time, she had neither eaten nor drunk. The researcher offered her water. She reached into his car and drank. When she had finished, she stayed by his side for a few moments and gently touched his chest with her hand as a sign of gratitude.
Elephants, as is already evident, talk to each other. Sometimes they whisper softly, sometimes they howl loudly, and sometimes they talk at frequencies so low that the human ear can’t even hear them. They also communicate by grunting, kicking and visual signs, for example by bobbing their heads or ears. They use more than 70 different voices and about 160 signs, forming a kind of elephant sign language.
Although the family is headed by the eldest elephant, all the family members come together for a consultation before making a final decision on what to do. Since they are all working for the benefit of the family and not for their own, they look to each other before going into action to see if they are united in their intentions and if they are all really in agreement to do it. When they succeed, they celebrate their achievement by howling loudly, raising their heads high, touching and intertwining their hands.
The group spirit is also evident in the way we care for each other. Once, a young and spunky elephant named Ebony, daughter of the leader of a family called Echo, foolishly walked right into the middle of another family. The members of the family surrounded her with their bodies and prevented her from leaving with their feet. They kidnapped her.
Her mother and older sisters could do nothing. Her mother turned and left, but soon returned. Now she was no longer alone with her daughters, she had brought the whole family with her. All her family members went to the kidnapping family and rescued the terrified Ebony.
To do this, Echo had to first identify what the problem was and then how to fix it, and all the elephants had to work closely together to achieve their goal. But they are used to teamwork anyway.
All for one, one for all
In Thailand, a researcher divided an elephant yard in two with a volleyball net. On one side of the net, he put Asian elephants, who had to work in pairs, and on the other side, a table with bowls of corn. The table could move back and forth on a frame made of plastic tubes.
He wrapped the rope around the table so that the table moved towards the elephants if both ends of the rope were pulled at the same time, i.e. if both elephants grabbed the rope at the same time. If they started pulling at the same time, the food table under the net moved to the elephant side, if only one elephant tried to pull the rope, the rope slipped around the table and there was nothing left to feast on.
All elephants quickly realised that if they wanted to eat, they had to cooperate. They were so aware of this that they would wait patiently for a partner if the researchers took them away or prevented them from pulling on the rope.
One young elephant was particularly resourceful, if selfish for an elephant. Instead of torturing himself with the tug-of-war, he simply got on his end and let his partner do the tug-of-war himself.
Although the researchers didn’t observe him in his daily hygiene, he was probably extremely clean, like other elephants. Paradoxically, elephants wash with dirt. They regularly spray themselves with it and dust, and they enjoy rolling around in the mud. This gets rid of annoying parasites and insects, and, the researchers suspect, they are also a bit self-absorbed and concerned about their public image.
In fact, they are a bit like humans, and have quite a lot in common with them. For example, they both adapted to life in the African savannahs and forests around the same time. They both developed a complex system of communication, and they both developed their brains enormously because they needed them to survive.
For example, elephants can remember where the water holes are, even if they are kilometres apart, and return to them year after year. They have learned how to bundle twigs together and use them to chase away flies. They also know how to make a hole in the ground, using chewed bark to help them.
But they need almost none of these survival techniques when living in captivity. Elephants living in American zoos suffer from the same problems as Americans: 75% of them are too heavy or obese. As a result, 25 to 40 per cent have leg or joint problems, depending on how old they are, and 80 per cent suffer from nervous tics, such as uncontrollable head bobbing or head bobbing.
A study of British zoos shows that elephants spend 83% of their time indoors. More than half of them have nervous tics and one elephant had them for 14 hours every day.
Captive elephants are less fertile than those in the wild and on average die younger. In captivity, they spend far too many hours a day pacing around or standing still, whereas in the wild they move around a lot and cover even greater distances in the rush for water and food. Elephants are herbivores and eat between 70 and 160 kilograms of vegetation a day. This is difficult to digest, and zoo food is calorie-dense in a way that is almost impossible to find in their natural habitat, so they are often obese.
Captive elephants also sleep less well. They don’t like lying on hard floors, often stone or concrete, so they can’t get enough rest.
Elephants cannot live with their families in captivity. They have company, but not the family members that surround them in the wild. Even if they become attached to a complete stranger they have just met in the zoo, they may soon lose her again, because their stay in the zoo depends on the goodwill of the zoo’s management, which can sell either of them at any time.
In captivity, they also do not respect the natural laws that govern how adult female elephants live alone and how elephants live alone. They may indeed go out on their own as they mature sexually, but they are not the loners they first appear to be. They like to socialise, but the mixed groups they have to live in in captivity are not for them.
Although there are many protests against elephants living in zoos, circuses and sanctuaries, they are still working hard to ensure that as many elephants as possible are born to them, as they are the only way to replace those they have lost to disease or old age.
Elephants thus live and will continue to live in environments where they do not have adequate social networks, where their living spaces are too small and wrong, where they do not like the climate they have to endure, and where they do not like the food they have to eat. As intelligent as elephants are, it is a miracle to some that they can survive in such circumstances.
Where is my food?
Not comparable in size and weight to the elephant is the North American bird Cark’s nuckraker (Nucifraga columbiana), which lives in higher elevations, such as the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
These birds are able to survive solely because of their remarkable memory. Like many other animals, they gather food for the winter in autumn. They harvest more than 30,000 tiny pine cones, but not in one place. They take their winter food supply to almost 5,000 different places. If they remember where the food is, they will survive the winter; if they forget, they will die.
Their survival depends solely on how good their memory is. But discovering food supplies is not easy. In winter, snow covers their hiding places and makes the surroundings look different. They no longer have the orientation points they knew when they were hiding food, so they have to find their way as best they can.
The researchers believe that they discover food using their extraordinary spatial memory, which helps them to identify terrain features despite the snow. Humans do not have this ability. It would be hard for him to remember where he put 30,000 keys, for example, when it is hard for him to remember where he put one key, but these birds have to, because it is their way of life and they have adapted to it through evolution.
Thus, they have a better spatial memory than other birds, but it is not clear how accurately they use ground landmarks, whether they remember more of them and perhaps use geometric relationships between these landmarks and their food hiding places.
Pineapples are small and their hiding places are so small that they really need to know their exact location. It is possible, they think, to create a kind of map in their mind of landmarks in the environment and then remember their hiding places according to that.
In essence, they work in much the same way as commercial travellers, who keep in their heads all the points they need to visit and then find the optimal route from one to the other. In this way, these birds could also keep all the hiding places in their heads and then move systematically from one to the other.
They are also said to have a much better developed ability to calculate their current position “blindly”. Humans don’t use this ability much because we orient ourselves by features in our surroundings, but when we get lost in the woods, for example, we also start to work out which direction we came from and where to go next.
These birds find 90% of their food and hide it from other birds, just like the Californian jays.
California schools
Jay lives with his friends in one of the buildings on the Cambridge University campus. There are at least ten people in three rooms at any one time, but no one ever knows which room they will wake up in because they don’t have permanent beds. On top of that, they are all quite special: they like to steal each other’s food.
Although they act like students, Jay and her friends are not. They are Californian schoolgirls who are being studied in Cambridge because they have special memories and abilities.
To prevent anyone from sneaking her food away, Jay hides her in a hiding place, but if she senses that another bird has seen her while she is hiding, she remembers it. He flies away and returns when the air is clear. He quickly picks out the hidden food and hides it somewhere else unnoticed.
This is important for her because she never knows which room she will sleep in. If she wants breakfast, she has to have food stashed everywhere. On top of that, she likes a varied menu. If she already has cereals under the bed for breakfast, she will not bring new cereals, but will add nuts. She does the same for lunch, but as there is often nothing on the menu that she wants, she deliberately saves a treat from breakfast.
He gets food from students by stealing their leftover lunch. This would be no big deal if she ate the food immediately. But she doesn’t. California schools hide their treasures all over campus when they have the chance, returning to them to stash them in a safer hiding place if they feel they are in danger. They eat their food at the third opportunity.
This shows that they have a remarkable spatial memory because they remember where they have hidden things, and by hiding food for later, they also reveal that they are able to plan for the future or for days when food is scarce. On top of that, they can think strategically, hiding food in another place when they think another bird will steal it.
Until now, animals were thought to be trapped in time and incapable of planning, but the Californian schools are proving that they too can imagine themselves in another time and place. In humans, this ability is crucial for survival because it allows planning and thus increases the likelihood of survival. For example, it is this ability that allows us to prepare food for times of scarcity.
Of course, it is not certain that Californian coyotes have the same ability as humans, because they cannot explain their motivation, and not every action of the animals is deliberate. Birds, for example, do not migrate because they anticipate that it will get colder and life will become dangerous, but because they are forced to do so by falling outside temperatures.
But the schools in Colombia do seem to be different. In one experiment, a researcher at Cambridge determined that they could wake up either in room A or in room B. They always got breakfast in room A, never in room B. During the day they stayed in room C and there was plenty of food. They were allowed to eat as much as they wanted and to hide the food.
What have they done? They hid some worms and crumbs from room C in room B, which had no breakfast, even though they were up to their necks when they did it. So they anticipated that the next morning they would be hungry and there would be no food, which shows that they are able to anticipate and plan.
They also seem to have known the shelf life of their food. They quickly learned that worms perish faster than pine nuts, and they would eat the worms first, even if they had hidden them recently, but they would go to the pine nuts if they calculated that the worms were already useless. So they took care of themselves as thoughtfully as a human being.
Unadapted but skilful
Cats can take care of themselves too, and they use their surprisingly good short-term memory to do it. Experiments have shown that they have much better memory than dogs, for example. When they had to remember where their food was hidden, they retained it for 16 hours, while dogs forgot it after just five minutes.
It doesn’t help that their brains are bigger than cats’, at 1.2 in relation to their weight, whereas cats’ brains are only 0.9.
It is responsible for thinking and making informed decisions, and it is also the area of the brain that processes emotions and perceptions from the environment. It is where speech or other forms of communication are deciphered and, of course, where short- and long-term memories are stored.
The cerebral cortex in cats is much more developed and complex than in dogs, with almost 300 million nerve cells, compared to only 160 million in dogs. In the brain centre responsible for vision, for example, the cat has more nerve cells than humans and other mammals.
But that doesn’t mean that the cat remembers everything forever, or that it remembers everything one by one. No, it retains what is useful to it and learns from it. If she watches her owner do something for a long time, for example opening the door of a cupboard where there is food, she will eventually learn to do it herself, if it is to her advantage, of course.
This ability dates back to her time in the wild, when she watched her mother hunt, eat, defend herself and so on, although, like many people, a cat remembers what she has tried better than what she has merely watched.
As in humans, cats’ memories decline with age. They can get sick in the same way as humans and become disoriented, depressed and aggressive, but these are symptoms of the disease, not their underlying nature.
But, truth be told, cats are inherently more impulsive and less patient than dogs. If the circumstances are not right, they will not tolerate them for very long, and in particular they do not want to do anything that they do not see as directly benefiting themselves. Dogs will do almost anything for a reward or the love of their owner, which shows that they have a higher social intelligence quotient than cats, but cats are better problem solvers than they are.
Both dogs and cats are very emotional. When a friend dies, they both grieve. Like humans, cats can express their pain by being aggressive towards others or by having accidents at home. However, because of their short-term memory, this period passes if they are not reprimanded and punished during it. If they are, they remember the new attitude towards themselves after they have naturally forgotten why it happened, and they may remain aggressive.
Dogs are more attached than cats and remember their owner, even if they have been away for a few years. Some experiments even suggest that they might be self-aware and therefore have a rather complex long-term memory. In fact, they seem to be able to decipher memories that are not linked to training and commands.
In reality, researchers don’t know much about the memory of cats and dogs, only that it is only as strong as it benefits them. For example, a dog will remember where it saw someone drop food and will look for it there later. When it comes to food, dogs have excellent long-term memories, and they are good at remembering tricks they have learned.
California sea lions
Nevertheless, they are complete amateurs compared to the Californian sea lions. Rio the sea lion was born in captivity. Her mother didn’t like her, but she got a loving mother, only she wasn’t a sea lion, she was a human. So Rio grew up in a laboratory, and from a very young age she took part in experiments to find out what sea lions remember.
When she was 6 years old, she was shown three plates. Each plate had a letter or number on it. Her attention was drawn to a mark in the middle, let’s say it had a number on it. When it made a clicking sound, she had to decide which plate was consistent with the one in the middle, the left or the right.
If she made the right choice and picked a number, she got a fish and a high praise. If she made the wrong choice and chose a letter, she wiped under her nose for the fish and heard a low tone. She soon figured out how to get the fish and the praise.
Then the researchers changed the rules of the game. The answer that was correct before was now wrong. Now the correct answer was a letter and number pair. Rio made her first mistake, but quickly realised what she had to do. The researchers changed the rules of the game in ten attempts, but not always, so she couldn’t remember how the system worked and predict when the rules would change.
After one year, the researchers repeated the exercise. During this time, Rio didn’t even see the number and letter plates, let alone practise with them. Will she remember what she has to do? She was excellent. She remembered both the letters and the numbers, she knew how to pair them up and she was still extremely quick to spot when the rules of the game changed.
She got her fish and was happy. Ten years passed. The researchers wanted to know: does a sea lion have a good enough memory to remember how to solve such a complex problem even after a decade?
Rio was now 16 years old and somewhere in her middle years, given that sea lions have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years. This time, her task was made even harder. Now she was no longer just pairing letters and numbers, but also trees, people and flowers. She had known all three before, but she had never been told that she had to link them together. After ten years of not using her skills, she completed the task without any problems.
Rio proves that even after ten years, the Californian left can remember how to solve an abstract problem. It also shows their potential to recall rules they once learned and apply them to completely new circumstances.
In the wild, sea lions, for example, remember where they were born, as well as places where it is good to eat. They remember each other even after a few years. For example, young sea lions still recognise the sound of their mother four years after they have gone out on their own.
In the wild, sea lions seem to rely heavily on long-term memory, both for their social interactions and for solving spatial problems. This ability is essential for their survival, but it is now under threat.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the amount of algae in the sea where they live. Algae contain domoic acid, which is toxic in excessive amounts. It dangerously alters the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory. The changes in the brain lead to seizures similar to epilepsy and damage to the hippocampus.
Fish eat algae. Sea lions eat fish. And domoic acid destroys their brains. Researchers note that it affects their spatial memory, and this could threaten their survival.
After 30 sea lions were rescued from the wild, researchers began to observe them. They looked at their brains using MRI and measured the size of the left and right halves of their hippocampus. Even without this, they detected that some were showing signs of domoic acid poisoning.
Then the sea lions had to pass tests. In the first, they had to decide between the left and right side. Once they were given food on the left side, the other time on the right. The healthy sea lions quickly detected the pattern in which the food moved back and forth and made the right choice each time. They followed the pattern even when the food was covered for a few seconds, because they knew they would get to it sooner or later.
Sea lions whose right hippocampus was damaged struggled to remember how the system worked and were unable to find their fish.
In the second experiment, the sea lions were shown four buckets. One always had food in it, the other three did not. For the next 12 days, the buckets were placed in four different places, but the same bucket was always in the same place. The healthy sea lions found the food bucket faster each day until they remembered which one had the fish and went straight to it. Sea lions with damage to the right half of the hippocampus did not fare so well.
Failing a test is not a problem for them, but in freedom, such a deficit could be fatal. It shows that their spatial memory is impaired, which would make it difficult for them to navigate and find food in the sea. It is also possible that some sea lions strand on the shore and behave strangely in the sea because their hippocampus is defective.
But that’s not all. When researchers examined the brains of healthy sea lions, they found that two areas of the brain, the hippocampus and the thalamus, were talking animatedly. In the diseased ones, they don’t, suggesting that domoic acid poisoning may be causing not only spatial memory loss, but also deeper brain damage.
How many sea lions have been poisoned so far and how many have died as a result? There is no way of knowing, as few carcasses wash ashore. Most animals sink.
