Where do male elephants go when they leave the family herd to strike out on their own? And what do they do? It’s a bit of a mystery, but Vicki Fishlock of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP)plans to find out. And she also tells us why this information is so important, especially for the often rocky relationship between humans and elephants.
Young Male Mysteries
BY VICKI FISHLOCK | AERP NEWSLETTER
Tracking the 1,650 elephants that make up the Amboseli study population is hard work.
We try to keep tabs on every elephant born into the 54 extant Amboseli families. Basing ourselves in the National Park helps, because females rely on the permanent water in the Park, returning regularly and quite predictably. Mature males return to the Park seeking mating opportunities with those females.
These ranging patterns have allowed us to build detailed pictures of family membership, female friendships, female reproductive success, and musth cycles in the older males in an unparalleled long-term study.
Three bulls gently playing; after leaving their families bulls make life-long friends
As we move into the fifth decade of research, we are focusing on the challenges elephants face in Amboseli. We are in the process of launching a new study to follow what happens to males during their process of independence.
When they leave their families as teenagers, males start using different areas (male and female elephants use landscapes very differently) and integrate into male society. Some males leave their families very young, others (the “momma’s boys”) stay much longer. Some take several months to leave the family completely, going and returning for days or weeks; others leave abruptly, never to return; others join up with other families, sometimes for years.
There are clearly a range of strategies at play, but we don’t understand how they might translate to later success.
Why does this matter?
Males are probably the key challenge in managing a human-elephant interface. They are the risk-takers, learning crop raiding and fence breaking from their older male friends. They are also the explorers – first to move into areas, or use new resources, with females usually following several years later. As Amboseli changes for both humans and elephants, understanding those young explorers will allow us to provide hard data to underpin management decisions.
Bryn aged six; This photograph of him is on one of our old ID cards
Bryn all grown up. Spot the U-shaped notch that gave us the clue? Luckily for us, males often resemble their mothers, and Bryn’s ears are very similar to his mother Brita’s.
It’s a big challenge. Often males disperse and basically disappear from our study area. Then they appear again all grown up and it’s hard to recognise them. To tackle this problem we have launched a new numbering system for males that we can’t immediately place, allowing us to take systematic data even before we are certain of who they are.
Previously, Ely (the famous son of Echo, born unable to straighten his legs) was our absentee of the longest duration (8 1/2 years). We just got a new record holder however: for the past three years we’ve been seeing a distinctive male with huge ears, who has become known as X007. He was very nervous to begin with, telling us it had been a long time since he had been in the safety of the Park.
During a visit by Phyllis Lee (who supervised my PhD), we started digging through some old photos, and there he was – Bryn of the BC family. His last recorded sighting was in 2001, some 10.5 years before his return as X007! Unlike James Bond, he hadn’t escaped his adventures totally unscathed – somewhere along the line he lost the end of his trunk, probably to a snare. Now as a 33-year old male, he has come back in musth looking for females. He is also particularly interesting as one of the few males we have documented to use both Amboseli National Park and the Chyulu Hills, where connectivity is limited.
We hope to launch our new study to unravel the mysteries of the young males in August.
This article was first published in the Amboseli Trust for Elephants newsletter. You can read the original here.
About the author. Dr Vicki Fishlock joined ATE in January 2011 to study social disruption and recovery in elephant families after the terrible 2009 drought. Her work focuses on leadership and negotiation in the face of risk, as well as the very long-term social dynamics we have documented in Amboseli. Prior to working in Kenya, Vicki studied gorillas and forest elephants in the Republic of Congo, where she earned her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Phyllis Lee, examining the use of forest clearings as social arenas for elephants. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Stirling. Vicki’s work is Supported by The International Fund for Animal Welfare.