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Elephant Research in Amboseli:
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I have been studying elephants in Amboseli for the last 28 years, and I have been extraordinarily privileged to spend the best part of my life with the wonderful elephant population there. I feel very lucky to have lived with them and to have followed their lives for all these years. I also feel that I would like to give something back to them and to all elephants.
Today I would like to talk about research, as this is the topic of the conference, but I want to address two aspects of research: first, the scientific studies that have done in Amboseli over all these years; and second, some of the implications of that research.
I started my
career with elephants back in 1968, 33 years ago, when I worked with Iain
Douglas-Hamilton for eight months in Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania.
When Iain’s research was completed I moved to Nairobi, and from that point on
all I wanted to do was my own study of elephants. It wasn’t easy to get one going, and it took me another
four years to find support and a place where I could do my work.
I was looking
for particular characteristics in the elephant population I was to study. From
the very beginning I wanted to do long-term research on a relatively undisturbed
population. What was happening in
Africa in the early 1970s is that elephants were being highly disrupted. They
were already being poached then, and they were also being confined to
restricted, protected areas. For
example, in Lake Manyara, the elephants had lost 75% of their range in the 50
years before Iain began his work. What I wanted was to study baseline behaviour,
ecology, demography, and social organization of a population that was still
relatively “natural” or undisturbed, and I found that in Amboseli and much
more as well.
There are
several reasons why Amboseli is such a good place to study elephants.
Although the Park is small--it is only 150 square miles, 390 square
kilometres--the area over which the elephants roam is large.
It is about 3,500 square kilometres, and the elephants are unrestricted,
which is unusual in most of Africa today. The
Amboseli elephants move in and out of the Park in regular patterns, moving right
down into Tanzania, way up north and to the east and west. When they leave the
Park they are moving on old trails and routes that they have been using for at
least four or five hundred years, as far back as we have oral history.
The Park is a dry season holding ground where animals come for water and food. Its lifeblood is Kilimanjaro which feeds the swamps, streams, and springs in Amboseli. It is the water which percolates down from the slopes underground and then wells up in Amboseli that creates this paradise for animals. There in the dry season great numbers of animals congregate, making it a marvellous place for tourists and for the animals themselves. There are zebras, wildebeest, gazelles, giraffes, buffaloes, lions, cheetahs, leopards, elephants, fabulous birds, the whole range. They are all packed into the Park in the dry season in astounding densities.
Along with
these wild animals, and using the ecosystem in much the same way, are the Maasai
with their domestic stock—cows, sheep, goats and donkeys. The Park used to be
the centre of their range and only became a national park in 1974.
Amboseli was a dry season refuge for the Maasai as well as the wildlife.
Losing this part of their range has been difficult for them and a source of
conflict, but finding ways for the Maasai to benefit from the Park continue to
be sought. Without their
cooperation there is no future for Amboseli for they are the key to why Amboseli
is extraordinary.
In most areas
of Africa land-use patterns have changed drastically so that where there was
once savannah or forest, there is now agriculture or settlement.
The Maasai in the Amboseli area are more or less nomadic pastoralists and
pastoralism is not in direct conflict with wildlife. It is possible for
elephants and Maasai people to live side by side.
They have been doing so for many hundreds of years. They don’t
necessarily love each other, but they tolerate each other.
The Maasai can live with wildlife because they can share their range.
An agriculturalist cannot under any circumstances live with elephants.
The elephants will destroy and eat the crops.
The Maasai have a different attitude and even admit that elephants help
them in some ways. They explain that if there were no elephants in an area, it
would revert to thick bush which is not good for herding cattle.
There would be less grass and predators could more easily hide in the
bushes. Elephants have been called
“the architects of the savannah”. They
keep the savannahs open, creating and maintaining those beautiful African
landscapes that we love so much.
However, it’s
not an altogether idyllic situation. The
Maasai will spear elephants either in retaliation for livestock being killed or
more seriously when a person is killed by an elephant, and they will simply kill
large, dangerous wild animals to prove their bravery. We lose a number of elephants each year, but some years are
worse than others. In a drought
year when there is fierce competition for the remaining resources, upwards of 20
elephants might be speared, but in an average year or a high rainfall year there
may be no elephants speared. The result is that the number of elephant deaths in
Amboseli is small in comparison to what has happened in most of the rest of
Africa. During the height of the
poaching in the 1970s and 1980s Kenya alone lost 85% of its elephants. The
continent lost over half of its elephants in the decade from 1979 to 1989.
During the same period Amboseli’s elephant population grew from 480 in
1979 to 719 by the end of 1989. That was partly because of the Maasai, who
don’t poach and don’t allow other tribes to come in to kill wildlife, and
partly because of the presence of this research project. Obviously, I would
rather not have any elephants speared, but Amboseli does not have gangs of
poachers with AK47s mowing down dozens of animals in a day, nor does it have a
management system that has a policy of culling several hundred elephants each
year.
So what Amboseli had when I was looking for a study site, and what it still has, is a relatively undisturbed population with an age structure that has been influenced more by environmental pressures than by man-made pressures. In Amboseli the population is as intact as can be found in the savannahs. There are elephants ranging from newborn calves to animals in their early ‘60s. These are lucky elephants and it has always been my hope that the information we collect on this population can be used to help in the conservation of elephants throughout Africa.
From the very beginning I wanted the Amboseli Project to collect data on
baseline elephant behaviour. Now
I’m not saying this is the “only elephant behaviour”.
Elephants are the most flexible animals I think you can find, and so you
can’t say that because the elephants do something in Amboseli they do it
everywhere else. They don’t, and
they don’t even do it in Amboseli from year to year, but you can still get
some basis of what a fairly unrestricted, unpoached, and intact age-structured
population is doing.
An added bonus of my choosing Amboseli was that the elephants were already relatively habituated to vehicles. There had been tourism in Amboseli from the l950’s, and the elephants were used to vehicles, they trusted vehicles, and so I could drive up, switch my engine off, and just observe them. They just went on doing what they had been doing before I arrived. So my colleagues and I have the ideal conditions for behavioural research. We can be a fly on the wall as far as the elephants are concerned. We don’t want them to react to us. Many people ask, Do the elephants come up and greet you? Do you interact with them? I don’t. I try just to be there and have them go on doing whatever they were doing before I got there.
Another characteristic of the population I was looking for was that it be small enough to be able to recognize every elephant individually. For most of the study there have been less than 1000 elephants, a number that is easy to recognize. We have used the method pioneered by Douglas-Hamilton back in the 60s, that is, ear patterns. By 1978 the recognition file was complete, but we update it continuously.
My major work
over the years has covered social organization, behaviour, and population
demography. Elephants are very
complex animals. What I have
discovered in my study is that they have a multi-tiered social system. Iain Douglas-Hamilton showed that each family is matriarchal,
and that they have special relationships with other families, which are probably
kin. In my study I found even more
layers of social relationships. Starting at the centre is the family unit, and
radiating out from that is the bond group, which is two or more families that
have a special relationship. The
next tier is the clan, which is maybe ten or so families who share an area in
the dry season, then there are subpopulations that space themselves out into the
greater ecosystem, and finally the whole population, which includes the adult
males as well as all the family groups. How
they relate to each other within those tiers of social organization is totally
fascinating and continues to intrigue me.
The other focus of my research is just coming to fruition in a paper that
will be published in the next few months in the Journal of Zoology, namely 25
years of population demography. I
don’t think there is another study like it, certainly not on elephants.
I have been able to follow every individual with no interruptions for 28
years, recording their births, deaths, oestrous cycles, matings, age at first
musth and cycles of musth, age at first reproduction, intercalf intervals, and
more.
From the
beginning it was always my wish to have other people join me on the Project to
work on various topics. It wasn’t
supposed to be a one-person enterprise. The
first thing that was clear was that I desperately needed a second person to
study the males because the males were so completely different from the females
that it was necessary to treat them almost as two different species.
First they are dimorphically different, with males weighing six or seven
tons and standing maybe twelve feet at the shoulder, while the largest females
are three tons and maybe eight feet at the shoulder.
This dimorphic difference is a reflection of the social organization and
mating strategies in African elephants and it raises many interesting questions. For instance, males actually grow their tusks faster in the
last decade of life than they do at any other time. Why would they do this, what male-male competition is
going on at that time that would make them grow tusks even faster between 50 and
60 year of age than they might at any other point?
I remembered when I was working with Douglas-Hamilton that he also had
questions. He didn’t know where
males went for months at a time, and then they would suddenly appear and mixed
with the families for a while and then they would be gone again.
Their behaviour was a mystery.
In 1976, Joyce Poole joined the Project.
She was an undergraduate at the time and 19 years old.
I asked her to work on the bulls, and I think many of you know that her
results have been very exciting and have opened up our eyes to the whole concept
of musth in African elephants and what its role might be, as well as much more
about male-male competition, aggression, and mating strategies.
Then in the
late ‘70’s, a Canadian, Keith Lindsay, began his research with the Project.
He did both a Masters and a Ph.D. over the next seven years on habitat use and
feeding behaviour, which provided important information on elephant ecology in
Amboseli. With his work we had a
much better understanding of the needs of the elephants and their place in
ecosystem.
In the early
‘80’s, Phyllis Lee, who is now a reader at Cambridge University, joined me.
I had already been studying maternal behaviour and calf development, and
we worked on that together and learned quite a bit about the first couple of
years of an elephant calf’s life, and the behaviour of the mother to the calf,
etc. But perhaps the results that were the most interesting were
those on allomothering, that is, the behaviour of an individual who takes care
of an calf that is not her own. We
found that the role of female calves is extremely important in elephant
families, in that these young females-- anything from two to three years old on
up to about 10 years old--spend considerable time with small calves, watching
over them and giving the mother time to rest and feed, which is just what a
lactating mother needs. We found
that those families who had multiple allomothers were significantly more
successful at rearing calves than families with few or no allomothers.
In the mid ‘80’s, Sandy Andelman carried out a short study on female competition and cooperation. This a topic that fascinates me and needs much more study. I would like to understand more about how families space themselves, what kind of competition is going on for resources or matings, what levels of aggression and affiliation there are within and between families.
Also in the mid-80’s, Joyce returned to Amboseli and started a study of elephant communication. Her goal was to document the whole repertoire, that is, all the different vocalizations that elephants make. Around that same time, just as Joyce was starting, Katy Payne joined us for a couple of months. She had just discovered that elephants made sounds that were infrasonic from work she did at the Portland Zoo, and she came to Amboseli to find out whether infrasound also occurred in the wild. Not surprisingly, it did, and she went on to study elephant infrasound in southern Africa. In the meantime, Joyce continued to look not so much at the structure of the sounds or how far they went, but rather what the sounds mean, what were the elephants conveying to each other. She has studied this off and on now since the mid-80’s and is back to working on it almost full-time now. She is up to 70 different vocalizations with what appear to be 70 different meanings. It may turn out that some of those are overlapping, but that is where the analysis is at the moment. Elephants are extraordinarily vocal animals in the wild, and they do talk to each other a lot, and apparently say all sorts of interesting things, and I am greatly looking forward to the final results, although with elephants I have learned that nothing is ever final.
Also in the mid-80’s, Joyce and I started hiring and training Kenyan research assistants. This has been a great boon to the project, probably one of the most important things I have done in these 28 years. There are presently three research assistants, all woman from the area. Two of them are Maasai, and one of them is Kikuyu. They knew nothing about elephants and, in fact, were afraid of them, but they soon became totally passionate about their work and totally dedicated to elephant conservation. Soila Sayialel, who is now my Project Manager, has been with me for 15 years, and Norah Njiraini, who as our Training Coordinator teaches other African researchers how to study elephants, has been with me for 14 years, and the third, Katito Sayialel, has been with me for almost 10 years. They love their job, they love elephants, and they are just a tremendous asset to the project. If there is anything I might take pride in that I have done in all these years, it is giving them the opportunity to become the people they are. They do all the work, by the way. I, unfortunately, am not in the field that much, and they are the ones out there collecting data six days a week.
In l990 we started with our first Kenyan graduate student. This was a marvellous young woman named Kadzo Kangwana who came to us to do a Ph.D. at Cambridge University, having done her undergraduate degree at Oxford. She was looking for a research project, and so I asked her to study the relations between the Maasai and the elephants. Her work has given us many insights into Maasai attitudes, some of which are negative but some surprisingly positive. This knowledge has helped us with our negotiations with the Maasai.
After Kadzo completed her research, we took on another graduate student, Hamisi Mutinda, and he did a Masters on reproductive hormones and is just finishing up his Ph.D. on ranging behaviour, quite a different topic from his first one, but it was one I wanted some answers to. He’s been looking at how the elephants range over the whole ecosystem, what trails they use, and what decisions they make. He has tried to get at decision-making—where elephants go, who is in the lead, and who is determining the direction.
Also in the ‘90’s, Karen McComb, who is a lecturer at Sussex University, joined the project to carry out a study of communication and social relationships. She used playback experiments to ask the elephants questions, and this is why I find this research so exciting, to be able in some degree to get inside those brains of theirs. I had described elephant social organization, the multi-tiered system, the family units, bond groups, etc., but that was based on association patterns and geography. Karen was able to ask the elephants whether that meant anything to them, this structure that I had superimposed on them. She played calls of known females to known families with known females in them and recorded what happened. I’m happy to say the results supported my description. So far two papers from this work have been published. The first in Animal Behaviour shows that elephants have probably the largest social network of any land mammal. Each female knows at least 100 other females and can recognize their voices. That alone was fascinating, but then we just published a paper in Science in late April. This was on matriarchs as repositories of knowledge. Once again, this was done with playbacks, playing known calls to known families. We found that the families with older matriarchs, over 35 years old, responded much more consistently to the calls, and those families with the older matriarchs had significantly higher reproductive success than the ones that had younger matriarchs indicating that social knowledge has important consequences for elephants.
And now coming up to the present time, there is a major study on the genetic structure of the whole Amboseli population being carried out with Susan Alberts and Beth Archie from Duke University. We have been working on it for over a year now, collecting dung samples for DNA analysis, which seems to be working well after lots of trial and error and work in the lab on Beth’s part. The first results have just come out and they are intriguing and fascinating. After you have been with particular elephants for years and years and you get results like these, it is as if a window has been opened. It’s just so exciting to look down the list of matrilines and see who is related to whom. We’re collecting behavioural data along with DNA so that we can see whether relatedness influences social relations. Susan has received a substantial grant from NSF which means that this study will go on for another four years.
So that’s
where we are in Amboseli today after 28 years.
I’ve gone through all that research much too rapidly.
There are things I didn’t have time to mention and I didn’t do
justice to the studies I did mention. The important point to get across is that
the Amboseli Elephant Research Project is still a very dynamic project, a very
active project, it is not just petering out in any way at all. In fact, it gets
better all the time and I will do my best to keep it going.
Sadly, that is actually what I have to do in life these days--keep the
project going, and that means being an administrator and a fundraiser.
So while my assistants and my colleagues are in the field, I’m running
around the world collecting money and running an office in Nairobi. I have
recently started my own organization The Amboseli Trust for Elephants to
raise money for both operating expenses and an endowment. I am trying to raise $7 Million in order for the project to
run on the interest, and so that if I get run over by a bus tomorrow the project
will go on. With these things
sometimes you are so much the point person and they think, Cynthia Moss is the
Amboseli Project, but it isn’t just me at all.
I have to be front person and do the fundraising, but if something
happened to me, would the Project be able to go on?
I have to assure that it will and to do that I have to put the funds in
place.
My role
continues to change. Not only am I running the Project and fund raising, but I'm
turning my attention to what I think should be another aspect of research.
We know that research results can be applied in many ways, practically in
terms of conservation and in captive management.
But I also think we should consider other ways that research can move to
help elephants. I've spent 28 years
with elephants and have benefited scientifically, professionally and personally,
but for a long time I have felt that I have to give more back to them. I think
we have to start looking at how we're treating elephants and I think that
research should inform us on how we should treat elephants.
Back in the
1960s when some of us were starting our research, we didn't think so much of the
ethics of what we were doing. I remember reading one particular paper which
disturbed me a great deal. A scientist working in Uganda was interested in
elephant reproduction and he wrote a paper about one female African elephant.
He found this female in oestrus and followed her and her two-year-old
calf for two days recording all her behaviour. At the end of the two days he
shot and killed her and collected her ovaries and uterus and studied them.
He didn't say in the paper what happened to her calf. Now that man
happens to be an extremely ethical man. He
probably was then as well but he is particularly so today and I have the utmost
respect for him and for his science. But it was a different time then. He didn't think; I didn't think. I knew in my heart there was
something very wrong in what he had done, but I couldn’t even articulate how
it was wrong back then. I can
articulate it now and I feel a responsibility and an obligation to articulate
what I think should and shouldn't be done to elephants. This will probably cause
me to make some enemies, but I'm not afraid. This is one of the nice things
about getting old and crotchety, you see. You
can start saying things that will make people unhappy.
Anyway I don't
think anyone could spend 30 years watching elephants as I have, watching babies
being born, watching them grow up and have their own babies, watching elephants
in total freedom in Amboseli, just enjoying all those good things in life--being
silly or floppy running across a pan, or mudwallowing.
You can't watch a wild elephant in it's natural habitat doing what wild
elephants should do and not feel an obligation to say something about the way
elephants should be treated.
I’m not
afraid to say that elephants are highly intelligent and that they have complex
and deep emotions. We were always so careful about what we said, about
anthropomorphizing, but I think we’ve moved beyond that now. Elephants have
remarkably strong bonds with one another and those bonds are exhibited through
their interactions, which in turn reveal intense emotions. Knowing this we have
to start thinking seriously about elephant welfare and maybe even elephant
rights. I know it's a very
unpopular word, but I would like to see some changes in our attitudes towards
elephants and mainly in our justifications.
I'm always hearing: it's ok to do this painful thing to an elephant
because it's good for science; it's ok o disturb this elephant because it's good
for educating people; it's ok to confine and dominate these elephants because
it's entertainment, people are going to enjoy it, but none of these
justifications holds water with me any more. I'm not going to stand back and let
people say that anymore. I'm going to come out and fight. So some of you out
there be ready for it. Because this is what I'm going to devote the rest of my
life to, making sure that elephants are treated with respect and dignity.
I want you to
think about what you all do, what all of us do, field researchers as well as
captive people. I'm not saying one person's bad and one person's good. I just
want you to think about what you do and ask yourselves questions every time
you're about to do something invasive and disturbing and stressful and painful
to an elephant. Is this necessary
and really, really examine your justification, don't just throw out, oh it's
good for education, oh it's good for conservation, really examine what you're
doing. I think we allow ourselves to use the tried and true justifications which
I don't find tried and true anymore.
So I'm asking
for a kind of Bill of Rights for elephants, of what we can and cannot do to
elephants, and what they should have in life. I would ask you to help me,
because I think this is the audience to help me. I know that you all care about
elephants too and so I am asking you to join me in my campaign to make sure that
elephants are treated ethically and with consideration. I want you to stand up
for elephants.
Thank you.
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