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Elephants cooperate if there’s enough to go around but when rewards dwindle, sharing breaks down
- Team led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted behaviour experiments on Asian elephants in Myanmar to test the limits of their collaboration
- In the scenario where one partner could be left with no food, elephants showed competitive behaviours such as fighting, obstructing or monopolising the food
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Elephants are keen to work with friends to get food until there is too little to share, according to a new study that highlighted some similarities with humans.
The team, led by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that elephants decided whether to cooperate based on who their partners were and how they acted.
“Elephants, too, are careful about the decisions they make when cooperating,” co-author Joshua Plotnik said.
“The elephants’ tendencies to change how they compete for access to food and how they mitigate competition to maintain cooperation is an important sign of cognitive complexity and behavioural flexibility in this species.”
Plotnik is a comparative psychologist and leads the Comparative Cognition for Conservation Lab at the City University of New York which studies Asian elephants.
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