Echo: An Elephant to Remember
Echo, the elephant matriarch, was the subject of many NATURE films and the leader of a carefully studied herd of elephants in Africa . Last year, she died of natural causes. This film is a look back at this remarkable animal through extraordinary footage and interviews with the researchers that cared for and studied this amazing herd.
Highly intelligent, emotional, and expressive animals, it is little surprise that elephants live by social rules that are intricate. So complex and layered are they, that in elephant society males and females live in completely different worlds, with females dwelling in tightly bonded families that stay together for life, and males living a largely solitary existence.
Elephant families like Echo’s EB family are matriarchal societies. Within this structure, the matriarch, or lead female, rules over a multi-generational family of 6 to 12 members, most of which are her offspring, her sisters and their offspring. In Echo’s family, her sister Ella and daughters, Enid and Eliot help her keep the family in order along with her nieces, Emma and Eudora, her granddaughters, Edwina and Eleanor, and great-niece, Elspeth. Sadly, as the film documents, Erin, Echo’s daughter, was speared by humans and died. A tight-knit family like the EB works very cooperatively. They feed, rest, and move as one unit. Together they defend the family, search for food and care for offspring. Closely-related females will even cross suckle each other’s calves and some females will lactate indefinitely, taking on a wet nurse role in the family. Enid, Echo’s oldest daughter, has a natural mothering instinct and love for calves. She was an allomother, or babysitter, to her younger brother, Ely.
As tight-knit as they are, if an elephant family gets too large, it can split in two. This actually benefits both families as each can forage for resources more effectively if they take on different territories. Typically, such a split would take place between cousins, and usually not sisters or mothers and daughters. These split families, or “bond groups” can average 28 related elephants in 2 to 3 family units. The related groups will continue to associate and occupy the same home range, staying within a mile of each other and keeping in touch through rumbling calls.
Though all members of the family are essential for the group’s success, it is the mighty matriarch who assumes the most critical role. Typically the oldest and largest female member of the family, it is not uncommon for the matriarch to be a close relation to the previous matriarch. To succeed in her role, the matriarch brings years of experience and natural skills at leading her family and keeping all of its members together. She also has a sharpened memory of places and individuals. The adage that an elephant never forgets has some truth to it. An old female can remember where her mother or grandmother took her for water during a drought 30 years earlier, the sort of historical information that can save a herd during hard times.
Matriarchs are charged with making decisions that ensure the family’s safety, health and survival. Tapping into her years of wisdom and experience, she decides when and where to feed, when to move along, when to fight and how. Her influence is so great that if a matriarch is shot by poachers, the herd will likely remain by their fallen leader and be shot as well. In the case of Echo and her famous EB family, Echo’s regularity and as Martyn Colbeck explains, predictability may have saved the lives of the family members. During the 1970s and 1980s, the area outside of the park had a dark history of poaching of elephants traveling in large groups. Echo’s insistence on keeping her family within the range of Amboseli Park
One method elephant society has evolved to keep the family robust and healthy is by forcing out males once they reach puberty-a measure that protects against inbreeding. As they grow older and approach puberty, males, or bulls, grow increasingly independent of their family. They will eventually break off from the group, usually at around 12 years of age. Unlike the highly social females, bulls will live a solitary life, forming relatively few close and long-lasting bonds with other elephants. They travel alone or congregate with a herd of two to 14 bulls, occasionally joining a family on a temporary basis. During the breeding season, bulls wander widely, searching for receptive females. After mating is over, they leave the family and either rejoin a bachelor herd or go back to a life of solitary wandering.
Humans have had a devastating influence on elephant society. As humans kill off vast numbers of elephants and encroach on their habitats, elephants grow increasingly anxious, disoriented and, at times, violent. Since older, larger animals are more likely to be targets for poachers because their tusks are largest-and these are also the members of the family with the most critical role– killing these individuals damages entire family units for years. Due to poaching, the number of older matriarchs and female caregivers has drastically fallen, and some elephant groups contain no adult females whatsoever. The number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line, has also fallen. All of this damage within elephant societies leads to incidents of “elephant rage” or attacks on humans and their property. By understanding how killing one elephant reverberates through elephant society, humans may come to realize how great an effect they have on elephants, and on other humans.
Elephants, the largest land animals on the planet, are among the most exuberantly expressive of creatures. Joy, anger, grief, compassion, love; the finest emotions reside within these hulking masses. Through years of research, scientists have found that elephants are capable of complex thought and deep feeling. In fact, the emotional attachment elephants form toward family members may rival our own.
Joy
In the wild, joy is an emotion that elephants have no shame in showing. They express their happiness and joy when they are amongst their loved ones-family and friends. Playing games and greeting friends or family members all elicit displays of joy.
But the one event that stirs a level of elephant happiness beyond compare is the birth of a baby elephant. In Unforgettable Elephants, the birth of Ebony is one such occasion. The excitement of several of the females in Echo’s family can’t be contained as they are heard bellowing and blaring during the birth of the new baby.
Another highly emotional occasion in an elephant’s life is an elephant reunion. This joyful meeting between related, but separated, elephants is one of exuberance and drama. The greeting ceremony marks the incredible welcoming of a formerly absent family member. During the extraordinary event, the elephants about to be united begin calling each other from a quarter a mile away. As they get closer, their pace quickens. Their excitement visibly flows as fluid from their temporal glands streams down the sides of their faces. Eventually, the elephants make a run towards each other, screaming and trumpeting the whole time. When they finally make contact, they form a loud, rumbling mass of flapping ears, clicked tusks and entwined trunks. The two leaning on each other, rubbing each other, spinning around, even defecating, and urinating (for this is what elephants do when they are experiencing sheer delight). With heads held high, the reunited pair fill the air with a symphony of trumpets, rumbles, screams, and roars. Bliss.
Love
There is no greater love in elephant society than the maternal kind. Nobody who observes a mother with her calf could doubt this. It is one of the most touching aspects of elephant social customs. The calf is so small compared to the adult that it walks under its mother, who, incredibly, does not step on it or trip over it. Mother and child remain in constant touch. If a calf strays too far from its mother, she will fetch it. The mother often touches her child with trunk and legs, helping it to its feet with one foot and her trunk. She carries it over obstacles and hauls it out of pits or ravines. She pushes it under her to protect it from predators or hot sun. She bathes it, using her trunk to spray water over it and then to scrub it gently. The mother steers her calf by grasping its tail with her trunk, and the calf follows, holding its mother’s tail. When the calf squeals in distress, its mother and others rush to its protection immediately. It is easy to see why the bond between mother and daughter lasts 50 years or more.
Grief
One of the most moving displays of elephant emotion is the grieving process. Elephants remember and mourn loved ones, even many years after their death. When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes. While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk. Researchers don’t quite understand the reason for this behavior. They guess the elephants could be grieving. Or they could they be reliving memories. Or perhaps the elephant is trying to recognize the deceased. Whatever the reason, researchers suspect that the sheer interest in the dead elephant is evidence that elephants have a concept of death.
Researchers have described mother elephants who appear to go through a period of despondency after the death of a calf, dragging behind the herd for days. They’ve also witnessed an elephant herd circling a dead companion disconsolately. After some time, and likely when they realized the elephant was dead, the family members broke off branches, tore grass clumps and dropped these on the carcass. Another researcher noted a family of African elephants surrounding a dying matriarch. The family stood around her and tried to get her up with their tusks and put food in her mouth. When the rest of the herd finally moved on, one female and one calf stayed with her, touching her with their feet.
Rage and Stress
Terror, rage and stress, unfortunately, are also commonplace in the elephant repertoire of emotions. Terror afflicts baby African elephants who wake up screaming in the middle of the night after they have witnessed their families murdered and poached — a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Some researchers suggest a species-wide trauma is taking place in wild elephant populations. They say that elephants are suffering from a form of chronic stress after sustaining decades of killings and habitat loss. The recent surge in cases of wild elephant rage reported by the media is a sad indicator of the kind of stress that wild elephants are undergoing. Nearly 300 persons are killed every year by wild elephants in India
Human activity does more than put a stress on elephants to find resources. It can often disrupt the complex and delicate web of familial and societal relations that are so important in elephant society. Calves are carefully protected and guarded by members of the matriarchal elephant family. Any perception of danger triggers a violent reaction from the matriarch and, subsequently, the entire family. The extremes a family will go to protect a vulnerable new calf are reported in the news stories as fits of unprovoked “elephant rage.” Charging a village, storming into huts where harvested crop is stored, plundering fields and, if disturbed, turning violent are some of the instances reported by the media.
Compassion and Altruism
Compassion is not reserved for offspring alone in elephant society. Elephants appear to make allowances for other members of their herd. Observers noted that one African herd always traveled slowly because one of its members had never recovered from a broken leg. And in another case, a park warden reported a herd that traveled slowly because one female was carrying around a dead calf. One perplexing report was of an adult elephant making repeated attempt to help a baby rhinoceros stuck in the mud. She continued to try to save the baby rhino despite the fact that its mother charged her each time. Risking her life for the sake of an animal that is not her own, not related to her, or even her own species is remarkably altruistic in nature.
While there is a great deal more to learn about what elephants feel, such accounts are astonishing. They reveal a creature that weeps, revels, rages and grieves. They lead us to believe that the depth of elephant emotional capacity knows no limit. They are striking for they suggest that elephants act on feelings and not solely for survival.
