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https://www.science.org/content/article/elephants-gesture-signal-what-they-want-just-us>
"“I don’t know.”
“I want that one—no, that one, over there.”
“Did she really just say what I think she said?”
These phrases can be said with words, but they’re just as easily communicated
via gestures such as shrugging, pointing, and raising your eyebrows. But we
humans aren’t the only ones who move our bodies to convey meaning; several
other primates do it, too. Now, research published today in
Royal Society Open
Science has added another animal to the list. When presented with a tray of
apples placed just out of reach, semicaptive elephants used a variety of
gestures to communicate with experimenters until they received their treats.
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a conservation biologist at Harvard Medical School
who studies low-frequency hearing in elephants, says the results reinforce what
she and other researchers have observed in wild populations—and demonstrate
that gesturing elephants “understand exactly what they’re doing.”
Lead study author Vesta Eleuteri, a behavioral biologist at the University of
Vienna, has long been fascinated by the complexity of animal communication.
Elephants, she explains, express themselves using a plethora of sophisticated
signals. They bellow, trumpet, and rumble, and can detect one another’s seismic
waves. They touch one another with their trunks and secrete chemicals from
specialized glands. A study published last year even found that the massive
mammals address one another with specific, namelike calls.
Eleuteri and her colleagues have previously reported that elephants combine
gestures—such as ear flapping, trunk swinging, and tail waggling—with
vocalizations when greeting one another in the wild. But even though elephants
sometimes act in ways that are “uncannily similar” to humans, it can be tricky
to draw broader conclusions about their behavior, says Shermin de Silva, a
biologist and conservation scientist at the University of California San Diego
who wasn’t involved in the new study. “I can’t be in the mind of an elephant.”"
Via Bonobo.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
