The manipulation of tools is something widespread across the animal world. While most use them to aid in feeding behaviors, some can even craft their own tools to solve complex problems. New research on elephants has shown one individual to be particularly adept at tool use, even mastering it to have a shower.
The individual in question is Mary, an Asian elephant living at Berlin Zoo, who was spotted one day by researcher and senior author Lena Kaufmann manipulating a hose and showering her body. In fact, Mary was so competent with the hose that she could coordinate it with her limbs, systematically showering her legs and even using the hose like a lasso and flinging it over her head to shower her back.
“I had not thought about hoses as tools much before, but what came out from Lena’s work is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools,” said senior author Michael Brecht, from the Humboldt University of Berlin, in a statement.
We don’t really know how Mary acquired showering…When we studied it more quantitatively, we found that she indeed has a very good understanding of hoses.
Michael Brecht
“We don’t really know how Mary acquired showering,” Brecht told IFLScience. “The showering of Mary looked exceptionally elegant. When we studied it more quantitatively, we found that she indeed has a very good understanding of hoses.”
The researchers presented Mary with three different hoses to see which one she preferred and whether she was able to manipulate them all. “We offered her three different water hoses: the familiar zoo hose with a diameter of 24 mm, a thinner hose with a diameter of 13 mm, and a thicker water hose with a diameter of 32 mm,” write the authors.
They found that Mary preferred the 24-millimeter (0.9-inch) hose, spending the largest fraction of time showering with it out of all three options. When given the thickest hose, Mary chose to spend more time showering with just her trunk and when given the smallest, she spent the most time not showering at all.
The team thinks that the smallest hose was the hardest for Mary to handle and that she is capable of adjusting her tool use behaviors when presented with the different hose types. Despite being a “left-trunker“, Mary targeted her left body side more when showering with the hose and had a preference for showering her right body side more when using just her trunk.
They also observed an interaction between Mary and another elephant called Anchali, who was capable of manipulating the hose in several different ways as well – but also exhibited two sets of behaviors that changed the water flow rate to Mary when she was showering.
The first is a “hose-kink-and-clamp” behavior that saw Anchali bend the hose and keep it bent so that the water flow was restricted. The second the researchers called a “trunk stand”, which also led to a change in water flow.
The researchers also noticed some aggression from Mary towards Anchali and wondered if the aforementioned behaviors were purposefully done to get her own back on Mary, or if it was simply a side effect of Anchali playing with the hose.
“The hose kinking behavior is a quite complex behavior,” Brecht told IFLScience. “Anchali performed the whole sequence of this behavior over and over again (>50 x). We had a lot of debate about what she was doing there. We also tried to clarify what she was trying to do in additional control experiments, but there were no unequivocal results from these experiments.”
“Anchali also invented another novel behavior (the on hose trunk stand, where lowers the trunk & her whole weight on the hose), which also stopped water flow,” Brecht added. “The two behaviors together make me think she was trying to sabotage the showering of her mate.”
“We’d love to know if she thinks this is funny. I burst into laughter, when I first saw the behavior. Sadly, we really don’t know if Anchali thinks this is funny, or if she is trying to be mean.”
The IFLScience office votes in favor of a good old elephant prank.
The paper is published in Cell Biology.
Source Link: Elephant Tool Use Might Extend To Sabotaging Your Mate's Shower
