The mourning of the elephants

Amazing animals

The animal kingdom is fascinating in its variation. Whenever I learn a mind-blowing fact about a particular species which has carved out the strangest of evolutionary niches, I make a note of it, maybe for a future project. Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth, the subject of yesterday’s post, is filled with such amazing animal facts - so, as a Sunday bonus, here are some of the most curious.

Octopuses

‘Although octopuses have no cerebrum,’ the part of the brain responsible for memory and consciousness, Leaf writes that ‘they have large brains and are good at solving problems.'

‘For instance, if you leave them overnight in covered tanks in a darkened lab they will take the lids off their tanks, invade other tanks with fish in them, and eat them. Then they will return to their tanks in the early hours of the morning, affix the lids back on, and pretend that they had never left.’ Sneaky buggers.

Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish are a species of mollusk which ‘have a brain that goes through their digestive tube. Yet, possessed of one of the largest brains among invertebrates, they are able to count.’

Crows

I’m a big fan of corvids, that notably intelligent and slightly sinister family of shrieking birds thought in some cultures to be the souls of the damned.

‘Crows excel at solving an array of difficult problems. Indeed avian researchers have shown that corvids can trick insects to get them to come out of hiding places, and they can quickly solve multistage puzzles to obtain sticks they will use to pry out food. And, as we all know, parrots can mimic human speech. In fact, one is reputed to have learned 950 words and to have figured out tense.’

Ants

Leaf mentions how E.O. Wilson, the world’s foremost expert on ants, loved to startle people with facts about the insects.

‘Speaking in his mild Southern drawl, Wilson would astonish audiences with the raw numbers, informing his listeners that there are one thousand trillion ants in the world, and that the total weight of all “social” insects is 80 percent of the mass of all the bugs on earth. As he put it in one of his books, “Brazilian Amazon ants and termites together make up more than one-quarter of the [jungle’s] biomass—which includes everything from very small worms and other invertebrates to the largest mammals. Ants alone weigh four times as much as the birds, amphibians, mammals and reptiles combined.’

Sheep

Apparently ‘about 8 percent of rams show no interest in mating with ewes’, but will do so with other rams. There are also lesbian sheep, masculinised females known as freemartins, and this phenomenon has been noted since the time of the Romans and in cattle, pigs, and goats too (no mention of gay giraffes, though). Most freemartins came from mothers who bore twins, and during gestation were exposed to male hormones from siblings.

Leaf also mentions ‘sheep tornadoes’, which I’ve never heard of: ‘These are collective explosions of furious movement in which one sheep follows another in a circle, and the herd winds up spiralling around itself. The flock gains nothing by this, but they believe that their frenetic activity is purposeful. Just as the human doggedly labours on behalf of the pharaoh, striving to help him in his wish to build a pyramid that the ruler imagines will safely deliver him to the underworld, the sheep races ahead behind his leader, convinced that he must do so to reach a place of safety - the very spot he has just been at.’

Meerkats

Humans don’t rank in the top 30 of murderous mammals, but while one might expect to see wolves, lions and various monkeys represented, ‘a number of seemingly peaceful species are surprisingly murderous. Long-tailed chinchillas, ground squirrels and several ungulate species - including wild horses, gazelle and deer - all ranked in the top 50.

‘The most murderous mammal species? Meerkats— around 20 percent of meerkats meet their end at the hands (and teeth) of other meerkats.’

Dogs

Dogs literally love their owners - which is perhaps not a surprise to dog lovers. Leaf cites Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns, who ‘looked at whether dogs responded more to the praise they received from people they cared about or the food the people brought. Brain-imaging tests showed that in many instances they really did care more about accolades from people they loved than food.

‘The Emory team uncovered something else. The head of the group, Gregory Berns, is a dog lover, and he was curious to know why dogs are so capable of showering people with love… what Berns and his fellow neuroscientists discovered when they asked dogs to respond to different tasks using word commands. To make sure that the responses were real, they threw in some invented words the dogs didn’t know.

‘That had little effect. But the words they did know caused a spike in activity in the caudate nucleus and the thalamus. Since the caudate nucleus guides parts of language processing in humans and many of our emotional responses, including our feelings of romantic love, this seems not to be an irrelevant point…. Granted that dogs are rich in love and affection, that words spoken by an adored figure have the power to activate a dog’s caudate nucleus may not be a coincidence.’

Chimpanzees

Dogs are also very good at tasks that test memory and attention, about six times as good as chimpanzees in tests of concentration. In fact, ‘in one study chimps performed the worst of twenty-four mammal and bird species studied, only outperforming bees.’

Another interesting fact about chimps is that they are also more attracted to older females than to younger ones, because ‘female chimps in their forties have the highest fertility rates. To that degree, Jane Goodall reported that one of the female chimps she studied who was most sought after by males was so old that she was missing all of her teeth, and she had to eat her food with her gums. But she was highly fertile, and as Goodall observed she had enormous sex appeal. When she was in heat, there was a line of males waiting for her.’ What a lovely image.

Gibbons

Gibbons are probably the least well-known apes, notably keen to avoid human attention, but they are very beautiful and impressive to look at. This was my main takeaway from visiting ‘Valley of the Monkeys’ years ago, where I remember my daughter also learning about the birds and the bees from watching some baboons, and being rather horrified.

Leaf writes of gibbons, also known as Hylobates, that ‘they are among the best of the primates at swinging from tree to tree,. Their skill at this is so great that in a single motion they can fling themselves almost fifty feet while traveling at speeds approaching thirty-five miles per hour.’ Highly territorial, ‘they are legendary for the strength of their calls warning other Hylobates away. These shrieks and whoops are so loud that they can be heard as much as a mile off.’

Dolphins

Dolphins are clever and social enough that they pass the mirror test of self-recognition, but they are not alone. While ‘gorillas and baboons are so lacking in social awareness that most can’t even recognise themselves in a mirror… manta rays, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, Eurasian magpies, and some species of ants regularly pass a mirror test.’ Bottlenose dolphins are also among a small number of species who ‘name’ their children, including certain species of parrots - and elephants.

Elephants

There is so much to be said about these majestic creatures, among the highly-social species Leaf identifies as resembling humans in behaviour. Describing their mourning rituals, he writes: ‘The entire family of a dead matriarch, including her young calf, were all gently touching her body with their trunks, trying to lift her. The elephant herd were all rumbling loudly. The calf was observed to be weeping and made sounds that sounded like a scream, but then the entire herd fell incredibly silent. They then began to throw leaves and dirt over the body and broke off tree branches to cover her. They spent the next two days quietly standing over her body. They sometimes had to leave to get water or food, but they would always return.’

Credit: me