AboutNaomi Expertise Kruger National Park is the biggest reserve in South Africa. If you need to know more about Kruger National Park or the animals, I can answer. There are a few other game reserves in South Africa I can assist with if you need questions about them answered.
Experience
Past/Present clients None Most of my experiences have been on my various safaris in Kruger or other related reserves in South Africa.
Why is the elephant's brain very large even in proportion to their body size ( compare this with the dinosaur's brain and body size), which go against the rule of maximum utilisation of minimum resources.
I understand they have good memory and more intelligent than other animals. Also, they have big ears, partly to cool down their large brain.
Thank you. Your reply is very much appreciated.
Sincerely
Eddie
Answer Hello Eddie
Very good question. There are many different reasons by scientists (who are still investigating) this subject. The best I can do is give you the following:-
Conventional wisdom places elephants among the more intelligent, socially intricate and emotionally complex non-human species. This generally held conviction is based on legend as well as on decades of scientific research.
For almost two thousand years biologists and philosophers going back to Aristotle have claimed elephants to be highly intelligent with some even viewing them as quasi-moral agents(42). The literature is full of accounts describing the apparent intelligence of elephants. For example, one often related tale is that of Chadrasekhan, the elephant who would not lower a pillar of wood into a hole containing a sleeping dog until the dog was chased away(43). Another account is that of an elephant who placed vegetation under his feet to prevent himself from sinking into muddy ground where he was tied and could not reach dry ground. Yet another legend tells of captive elephants who stuffed their bells with vegetation so that they wouldn't rig when they entered the farmers' fields at night.
Rench's (1957) observations of domesticated elephants' ability to work with minimal instruction and their talent to function as a team with extraordinary balance and synchronization, pushing and dragging heavy logs onto a truck, caused him to credit elephants with true "ideation" - the ability to anticipate what will come of certain actions.
Many of the accounts of elephants' cognitive abilities are so truly astonishing that it is surprising that there has been so little scientific follow up. Just how clever are elephants?
Brain Size and Structure
Information available on the brains of elephants is very scarce with the majority of the literature based, in fact, on only a few specimens(44). Nonetheless, we do know that the brains of Asian and African elephants rank among the highest for absolute and relative mass, cortical expansion and complexity, features comparable only to those of some of the Cetaceans, man(44) and the Great Apes. The temporal lobes of the elephant's brain which are thought to function in recognition, storage and retrieval of information related to sight, touch, smell and hearing, are especially large and enormously complex and, relative to brain size, appear to be larger, more convoluted and denser than those of humans (45). Not surprisingly, the elephant's brain is the largest in absolute weight among land mammals, weighing 4.5 - 6.5 kg in African elephants and 5.5 kg in Asian elephants, Elephas maximus.
But is the elephant's brain bigger than we might expect for its body size? The encephalization quotient (EQ) is the ratio between the observed and expected brain weight for a defined body weight(46) which implicitly means body size is taken as a "given" and selection operates only on brain size. Looking at brain size in this way, an EQ equal to 1.0 is an "average" mammalian brain. Primates all have relatively high EQ with Homo sapiens at 7.0+ far above all other mammals. Proboscidean values, at between 1.7(47)and 2.3(48) are comparable to those of larger primates (eg. chimpanzee: 2.2-2.4; gorilla: 1.4-1.7; orangutan: 1.6-1.9(49). Where sexual dimorphism is pronounced, as it is in elephants, males have lower EQ values than females (EQ Loxodonta africana: male: ~1.0 - female: 2.0(49). So it is clearly important to know which sex is being measured. In many cases in the literature this information is not presented.
Many have argued that EQ is not, as it happens, a particularly useful guide to relative intelligence (eg. (50)). What should be important for intelligence is the absolute number of nerve cells in the brain since more nerve cells indicates the potential for more complicated networks (50 & 51). Elephants have a very thick cortex and even though the cell density is lower than in humans, it is estimated to have as many neurons, namely between 1011 and 1012. The neocortex volume relative to the rest of the brain ("neocortex ratio"), has been shown to correlate closely with social group size(52) suggesting that it underwrites the cognitive skills needed for complex social living. Moreover, the finding that neocortical ratio predicts the frequency with which primate species have been found to use tactical deception to solve social problems lends support to this argument (51). We know that elephants have a very large and convoluted neocortex (50), further supporting the notion that elephants are smart. But significantly more work needs to be done to answer the question just how smart they are. One way is to carry out more cognitive studies both in the wild and in captivity. But we also need more information on the brains of elephants.
In trying to obtain more information on brain size and structure we recently got in touch with Kruger National Park to find out what data they had collected during the elephant culls they carried out over many years. The answer: none! So a challenge to those working in the field - if culling is ever reintroduced a study of the brains of elephants should be incorporated.
Memory
As a general rule vertebrate species with absolutely large brains, like the elephant, have developed the complicated parts of the cerebral cortex to a greater extent, have greater capability for learning and seem to be able to learn more complicated tasks. In addition, it seems that larger animals with large brains also have the ability to retain information for longer - in other words they have better memory(53).
Based on the evidence available, elephants seem to remember for years other individuals(54) and places(47) and learned skills(53). In experimental trials involving a large set of visual symbols and acoustic tones or commands captive elephants show exceptional ability to learn and retain information over long periods(53). Accounts by practised observers indicate that elephants are able to remember the voices (and perhaps scents) of individual people for over 12 years (R. Moore, pers. comm. & J. Poole, personal observation).
Randall Moore (pers. comm.) recounts an extraordinary tale in which a former captive elephant, whom he returned and set free in African, responded appropriately to his voice and commands after 12 years of living in the wild.
Joyce has her own account of an elephant's memory. In the mid 1980s, Joyce established a special relationship with an 18-year-old male named Vladimir (see description in (55). When she parked her car nearby and called to him he would come to the driver's window allowing her to touch his trunk and tusks. They interacted, thus, perhaps 8-10 times over the course of some five years. Due to a variety of circumstances, after 1991 Joyce did not see Vladimir for 12 years. When she met him again in May, 2003 he was a 34-year-old-male and, with his grown-up appearance and new tears in his ears, she hardly recognized him. But there was something about the way he moved that told Joyce that this was her old friend. She drove nearby, stopped the car (a new car to him) and called his name. Vladimir left his path and came deliberately over to the car and walked by, almost rubbing his side on the car. Joyce circled again, parked and called his name. This time he walked up to Joyce's window and allowed her to touch his trunk and tusks just as she had done 12 years before.
Elephants presumably remember their own kind even better. Carol Buckley recounts a case where two elephants, Shirley (~53) and Jenny (~30), were reunited after 23 years apart. The unusual mothering behavior displayed by Shirley towards Jenny when they were brought together indicated not only that they remembered one another but also the adult-calf relationship they had once shared.
Playback experiments in Amboseli also provide good evidence for the exceptional memory of elephants. Companions use contact calls to stay in contact when visually separated and female elephants are able to remember and distinguish the contact calls of female family and bond group members from those females outside of their extended family network. Moreover, they can also distinguish between the calls of family units farther removed than bond group members depending upon how frequently they encountered them(56). Results of this body of work suggest that females would have to remember the contact calls from around 14 families in the population (~ 100 adult females) in order to achieve these discriminations. In addition, playback of the call of a 15-year-old female that had died, to her family unit, elicited contact calling and approach to the loud speaker 23 months after her death(56). And, playback of the contact call of a female who had departed from her family to join another 12 years previously also elicited contact calling(56).
Tool use and mirror self-recognition
Elephants are unusual among mammals in that they use and even manufacture simple tools. Their prehensile trunk is capable of manipulative movements similar to those performed by primates with their fingers and thumb. The sensorimotor specializations of the trunk are extensive(57) allowing the delicate manipulations of both large and small objects. Elephants pick up objects (logs, rocks) and throw them at their opponents, they use leafy branches as fly switches, short, sturdy sticks to de-tick themselves, and logs to neutralize electric fences to name a few (see Poole, 58). A recent study indicates that Asian elephants actually modify long branches to make the ideal fly switching length(59).
Passing of the Mirror-Mark-Test has been taken as a sign of self-recognition and recently elephants successfully passed the test(60). Dozens of primate species have been tested for self-recognition using the Mirror-Mark-Test and only chimpanzees and bonobos(61) and orangutans and gorillas have conclusively passed the test. The elephant case included examination of marks on the hips, forehead and cheek, areas of the body that are not normally visible to the elephant.
A discussion of elephant intelligence would be incomplete without mention of the well-known reaction of elephants to the death of a member of their species. Elephants exhibit a variety of responses to dying or dead elephants and to elephants bones or tusks including touching with the trunk and feet, attempted lifting and carrying of the body or bones, mounting, feeding, body guarding, covering and burying (see descriptions under ElephantVoices Visual & Tactile Database). What does their marked reaction mean? Could it be that elephants have an understanding of death? If not we challenge other scientists to come up with a plausible alternative hypothesis!
In short - While the brain of the elephant is the largest in size among the land mammals, it actually only occupies a small area at the back of the skull. However, in proportion to the size of the body, the elephant brain is smaller than the human brain. Despite this, the elephant is one of the only animals along with all apes (including ourselves), sperm whales and a few other creatures who has a large brain relative to body size.
"Brain size gives a rough measure of mental flexibility--some say intelligence--and large mammalian brains are associated with complex sociality" Katy Payne In Silent Thunder
Remarkably, the size of the bull African elephant can weigh 4.2-5.4 kg and the cow's as 3.6-4.3 kg. However, this difference in brain size between the sexes is not related to intelligence. Behavioural studies of elephants illustrate very intelligent actions from female elephants, that are equal or surpassing those of the male elephants. Remember, brain size without relation to body size is not generally that helpful. Given the fact that cows are generally smaller to bulls, the overall difference in mass in inconsequential. Also, the brain and consciousness of the cow is much different than that of a bull; they are reared and interact with their mothers in very different ways right from birth and while the females form a very close knit bond with each other which is constantly maintained, the males are more nomadic.
Interestingly, the growth and development of the elephant's brain is similar to that of mans. Both the elephant and man are born with small brain masses. The mass of the new-born elephant's brain is 35% of that of the adult, while Mans is 26%. Thus, there is considerable growth and development as the calf grows up. As the mass of the brain increases, so does the learning ability of young elephants.
Not surprisingly, evidence gathered from both anatomical details, as well as from behavioural studies, suggest that the elephant is a very intelligent animal. :)
