A matriarch walks through the African savannah at a leisurely pace, while her group follows her a few meters away. Nothing relevant seems to be happening around her, but she stops. Keeping her gaze in front of her, she swings her ears and places the two lobes located at the end of her trunk against the ground. Something startles her, because she shakes her ears vigorously and lets out a loud noise. What has happened?
If we want to understand an elephant well and what goes through its mind, we should not focus our attention on its gaze, as we would with a person, but on the tip of its trunk. In the mud, the matriarch had detected the recent urine of one of her daughters, whom she had not seen for days. That’s why she made a vocalization known as “contact call”. These animals always have their trunks moving, scanning the world around them, just like we do with our eyes. You could say that the trunk reflects the focus of your mind.
In the last 70 years, it has improved significantly our understanding of the perceptual world of elephants. We have learned about their physiology and sensory anatomy, we have tested the limits of their senses and we have analyzed their genes. All research points to the same thing: elephants are the mammals with the most developed sense of smell that exists. The world of elephants, It’s a world of smells.
To get an idea of how much they stand out, let’s compare them with dogs, an animal with which we are very familiar. A study published in 2014 revealed that elephants have around 2,000 genes dedicated exclusively to smell. These are double what our pet has and five times more than what we have. Regarding the interior of the nasal cavity, elephants have seven turbinates (bony structures with tissues specialized in capturing scent) compared to five in dogs.
The proboscis is the perfect structure for capturing odors. The air heats up as it rises and this causes the chemicals it contains to become more volatile and reach the receptors better. In turn, it has 17 muscles composed of up to 150,000 fiber bundleswhich gives it enough flexibility and mobility to bend at will and determine the direction of the source of the odor.
To perceive the less volatile molecules found in urine or gland excretions, elephants have a vomeronasal organ located in the upper area of the vocal cavity. With the tip of the trunk, they palpate these liquids, impregnate them with chemical substances and transport them to the organ, through a gesture known as Flehmen.
Of course, the level of olfactory development that these quadrupeds have achieved is impressive, but it is inevitable to wonder if it was really necessary. The rest of the herbivores survive without so much deployment of means in this sense, why have elephants insisted on promoting it so much? Just as we need to look at the anatomy and physiology of an animal to understand its behavior, we must also study how it behaves to understand its physique. These are two inseparable sides of the same coin.
The three species of elephant that exist, the Asian elephant, the savanna elephant and the forest elephant, have common aspects in their social behavior. On the one hand, females are those who remain in their natal group, with which they establish a strong bond. But these groups are dynamic and are in continuous processes of fusion and fission. Therefore, it sometimes happens that two related females with a strong bond are separated for days and, when they are reunited, the trumpets of celebration sound.
On the other hand, males, upon reaching sexual maturity, leave their natal group and form social relationships with each other, until they reach their most active sexual moment and become more solitary. If they are in good physical condition, once a year, for two or three months, they enter musth, a period in which their sexual behavior is exacerbated. Their testosterone levels increase, their temporal glands secrete temporin and they become more aggressive.
Meanwhile he musth of males occurs regularly, females are only in heat for a few days every four or five years due to their long gestation and weaning periods. Since both sexes live their lives separately, they need to communicate over long distances in order to meet on the exact days when they are sexually receptive.
It is in this social context, in which individuals constantly separate and reunite, that smell becomes so important. Elephants give a lot of information through chemical signals, such as their identity, their level of receptivity to reproduce, and their dominance status. These signals are released in urine and in different glands and, unlike vocalizations or gestures, they last over time and enable communication between individuals who are not close.
Furthermore, smell is a very important tool for a generalist herbivore like the elephant. In a study published in 2020, researchers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, set out to find out what criteria elephants use to choose the plants to include in their diet. They found that selection did not depend on their nutritional value, but on the amount of toxins they emitted.
another experiment carried out with captive Asian elephants, showed that they also use smell to evaluate quantities. The research staff gave them a choice between two glasses containing different grams of sunflower seeds (for example, 12 and 16 grams). The glasses were covered with a holey lid, so that they could not see inside, but they could smell it. The elephants had no problem always choosing the glass that contained the most seeds.
Finally, their sense of smell helps them detect threats. In Amboseli, Kenya, Kamba farmers pose no threat to elephants, while young Maasai demonstrate their virility by hunting them. These animals They differentiate the smell of both ethnicities and they show more fear and aggression when they detect Maasai clothing.
Better understanding the olfactory world of elephants has allowed us to make important practical applications, especially in the field of conservation. Especially in Africa, elephants often come into conflict with humans, causing damage to agricultural areas and infrastructure. The most common solution is usually to kill the animals, but new methods are already being implemented to control their behavior through odors.
For example, bee colonies are known to be a great deterrent to elephants and have begun to be used as a protective shield on farms. This has proven effective, but maintaining large numbers of hives poses logistical problems. That’s why, some researchers They prepared a mixture with bee pheromones and found that only with that substance it was possible to scare away the elephants.
These types of studies are crucial, since all three elephant species are in danger of extinction. If the elephants are lost, their entire world of smells goes out forever.
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