Elephants know when to lend helping trunk

[Shadow]

Elephants naturally understand when to lend a helping trunk much as people know when to lend a helping hand, displaying a complex level of cooperation confirmed only in humans and our closest relatives until now.


Elephants are widely regarded as possessing advanced brains, displaying levels of intelligence seen only in humans, dolphins, chimpanzees and others capable of higher forms of thinking. For instance, elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, learning that such reflections are images of themselves and not others, behavior apparently unique to species that show complex empathy and sociality.


Elephants know when to lend helping trunk - CBS News

 

[Tank]

 

[Shadow]

A group effort. Cool video...thanks for posting!

 

[Tank]

 

[Shadow]

Interesting elephant facts:

(from an email)

Did you know elephants Purr like cats??

Learn something new everyday...



Elephants have a slower pulse of 27...a canary's is 1000!

Only one mammal can’t jump — the elephant.

The trunk of an elephant can hold up to two gallons of water.

The elephant is the national animal of Thailand.

In a day, an elephant can drink 80 gallons of water.

In 1916, an elephant was tried and hung for murder in Erwin, Tennessee.

Elephants have been known to learn up to 60 commands.

During World War II, the very first bomb dropped on Berlin by the Allies killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

An elephant’s trunk can hold 2.5 gallons of water.

An elephant’s tooth can weight as much as three kilograms.

An elephant in the wild can eat anywhere from 100 – 1000 pounds of vegetation in a 16 hour period.

An elephant can live up to the age of seventy, or in some cases even more.

Elephants purr like cats do, as a means of communication.

An African adult elephant eats about six hundred pounds of food a day; that’s four percent of the elephant’s body weight!

Elephants can make very low frequency sounds, which are below the human range of hearing.

Elephants sleep standing up and stomp when they walk.

 

[Momanohedhunter]

Thus to-

Elephants "Hear" Warnings With Their Feet, Study Confirms
John Roach
for National Geographic News
February 16, 2006

When African elephants stomp and trumpet as a predator approaches, other distant elephants can get the news by feeling the ground rumble, a team of scientists recently confirmed.

The vocalizations and foot stomps resonate at a frequency that elephants can detect in the ground, according to Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, a biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Photo: African elephant

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* Creature Feature: African Elephants
* Video: How Elephants "Hear" With Their Feet
* Elephants May "Talk" Via Vibrations

She and her colleagues played the ground-shaking component of these vocalizations to elephants gathered around a watering hole in Etosha National Park in Namibia (map).

"What we saw was they bunch into a tighter group, orient in the direction of where the signal is coming from, and then leave the area much sooner than they would if nothing was played," O'Connell-Rodwell said.

These behaviors are indications that the elephants detected the call and interpreted it as a warning, she added.

O'Connell-Rodwell and her colleagues reported the finding this month in the online edition of the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

O'Connell-Rodwell first theorized that elephants use vibrations to communicate in 1992, but this is the first scientific evidence to support her theory. (Read "Elephants May 'Talk' Via Vibrations")

Peter Narins, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says he's pleased to see her theory validated by a scientific study.

"She's shown it before, but this is real. The data are here, the controls are here, and it's been collected in a study," he said.

Now O'Connell-Rodwell and colleagues are preparing a follow-up report on whether the elephants can distinguish different types of calls.

Preliminary results suggest that elephants react most vigilantly to familiar warning calls, but they also crowd together and act nervous when they detect unfamiliar calls.

Elephants "Hear" Warnings With Their Feet, Study Confirms

 

[editec]

I like to look at elephants but I wouldn't want to own one.

What a shame the species is doomed.

 

[Shadow]

You are correct Editec...Here is an article about their plight.


Last stand of the Asian elephant

JIA GABHARU, India – Every night when the rice is ripening in their fields, the young men climb into watchtowers to peer anxiously toward the Himalayan foothills from which the gray giants emerge.

Before them, a 5-kilometer (3-mile), high-voltage fence provides dubious defense against a crafty, brainy enemy. To their rear, patrols are mounted from settlements ringed by trenches and armed with spears, torches, stinging smoke bombs and sometimes guns and poison.

Here, in India's northeast state of Assam, is one of the hottest fronts of a heart-rending, escalating conflict. It is waged daily in villages, fields and plantations of 13 countries across Asia where forests and grasslands continue to shrink, igniting a turf war between one-time friends: land-hungry man and a simply hungry Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant.

The elephant's survival is at best uncertain.

Last stand of the Asian elephant - Yahoo! News

 

[Shadow]

Adorable: Baby elephants play in kiddie pool

(CBS) - In New York City right now it's overcast and raining, which only adds to the regular Monday blues. So what fights off the mopey Monday? Duh! Baby elephants playing in a kiddie pool, of course. Winning!!

Adorable: Baby elephants play in kiddie pool - The Feed - CBS News

 

[dilloduck]

I ain't riding one of them cute things