Scientists have found that elephants like “ears”.
Elephants males like “ears” – the observation of their behavior showed that they prefer to choose females, whose “buzz” they were not familiar, scientists say.
“Our study showed that males can get information about social information from those sounds, which the females use to communicate with other elephants. This discovery indicates that we need to pay attention to the intellectual abilities of males, including their ability to distinguish voices. It is not clear how long the males remember the voices of females, and it helps them to choose the right partner, ” says Angela stöger (Angela Stoeger) from the University of Vienna (Austria).
African and Indian elephants are highly social animals that use a variety of methods to communicate with each other, including using the sounds and infrasound. Elephants have a good memory, I remember all my friends and foes and have empathy for others.
Some elephants, as found steeger few years ago, watching a lone male named Basket in the zoo Jonin in South Korea, even trying to communicate with people and explore the “sounds” (the Korean word in this case) that people use. Basket hardly understand what he is saying, but he made further efforts to accurately follow the language of the Koreans. To this end, he put the trunk in his mouth and gave atypical for elephants sounds.
This discovery and other examples of good memory and high intelligence of elephants has prompted steeger and her colleague Anton Botica (Anton Baotic) the idea that males can use the ability to distinguish between voice and to emulate them in order to choose the females during the mating season .
The fact that elephants males usually lead a solitary life and does not live in herds consisting mainly of females and young individuals. In the forests of Africa and India, the visibility is extremely limited, and females may use the voice as a kind of questionnaire on the “Dating site” for all potential fans.
Following this idea, steeger and Biotic conducted an unusual experiment. They went to Addo national Park in South Africa and investigated how males that live there will respond to recorded voices of familiar females and strangers living in other parts of the Park or in other nurseries.
As shown by experiments, the elephants preferred to walk up and a long time to study those speakers, where there were calls completely unfamiliar females, whose “buzz” is more distant in structure from that which they had heard in the past months and years.
Interestingly, the reaction of the females was reversed – they preferred to approach the speaker, he heard the sounds of familiar animals. Scientists believe this is due to differences in lifestyle males and females – the latter linked by strong social ties with other members of their herd, while males have no such attachment.
According to steeger and Botica, such a train of males to total strangers may be due to evolutionary reasons – it can help them to avoid degeneration, however, this statement is yet to be proven during a longer observation of how males interact with several females in the wild.
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