An Asian elephant tried to revive her dead calf by nudging it back to life. She used her trunk and feet to get to the dead body for more than a day. The adults gathered around the dead calf to comfort the mother.
In the dense jungles of southern Asia, it's hard to spot displays of mourning. Scientists finally have the data they need to analyze grieflike displays in these elusive pachyderms thanks to a few dozen YouTube videos. They have found some surprises.
After 4 years of fieldwork in India, Sanjeeta Pokharel only observed one instance of an elephant responding to another's death. Even colleagues who had spent decades studying Asian elephants in the bush had only seen a few of these behaviors. Pokharel and her team at the Centre for Ecological Sciences turned to the internet.
The researchers searched for terms like Asian elephant death and elephant response to death.
Elephants attempt to revive a dead family member with kicks, and gather around its remains, as seen in the videos recorded by the team in Royal Society Open Science: Elephants.
Some of the videos captured rarer behaviors. In multiple clips, adult elephants use their trunks to pat their friends on their heads; in another, a calf cuddles up to its dying mother. In five videos, adult female elephants carry dead calves through the forest for days at a time.
Lindsay Murray is an animal psychology researcher at the University of Chester who was not involved with the work. Murray, who has studied how death affects the personality of surviving Asian elephants at the Chester Zoo, has turned to zoo webcams and online videos to remotely study animal behavior during the Pandemic.
A growing trend of research using video archives to learn more about animal behavior and ecology is called iEcology. Researchers have used videos on the internet to study behavioral differences between urban and forest-dwelling animals.
African elephants, as well as Chimpanzees, giraffes, and dolphins, have been documented for carrying dead infants. It's not clear if such actions represent grief or mourning in the human sense.
Pokharel believes that it is possible, as she sees an elephant reacting that way.
It is difficult to see behavior like that and not call it grief.
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