Mating behavior of African elephants: New findings
Male African savanna elephants continue to gain body mass throughout their lives, meaning older male elephants are often twice the size of females and younger males.
Contrary to the perpetually foolish claims of the hunting lobby, a new study proves that old elephant bulls are enormously important to elephant society.
Older bulls are not only larger and more active in mating than younger bulls — they are also preferred by female elephants. Their size demonstrates that they carry the best genes for the next generation.
The new study from the University of Oxford, Save the Elephants, and Colorado State University compared the movements of male African savanna elephants while they were in musth, a periodic state of intense, testosterone-driven sexual activity. The findings show that male elephants move more and exert greater effort during musth as they age.
The study, conducted by Dr Lucy Taylor at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, used a combination of visual observations and GPS tracking data from 25 male elephants aged between 20 and 52 years. The data were collected as part of Save the Elephants’ long-term monitoring project between 2000 and 2018 in the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserve in northern Kenya.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants and Senior Research Associate at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, says: «Older bulls are not only larger and more energetic in musth than younger bulls. Female elephants even prefer them, perhaps because their size demonstrates their survival abilities across many years and seasons».
The new findings suggest that male elephants benefit from their increasing size by putting in greater effort to seek out females as they age.
Trophy hunting: Cultivated perversion or perverted culture?
Given that older male elephants are both the target of trophy hunting and poaching, human-caused interventions can disrupt the age structure, potentially leading to changes in elephant reproductive dynamics.
On average, an elephant is killed by trophy hunters every 15 minutes.It is nothing less than a sick business driven by the desire to kill.The killing of elephants is not only a major loss from the perspective of species conservation. Trophy hunting typically targets the strongest and most magnificent animals. Yet these are precisely the ones most important for the survival of a species, as they generally ensure healthy offspring and the continuation of their kind. Trophy hunters decimate African wildlife on a considerable scale and repeatedly push animal species to the brink of extinction.
Dr. Taylor explains: «Investigating how elephants' reproductive tactics vary with age is crucial to our understanding of the behavioral ecology of the African savanna elephant and, ultimately, the driving forces shaping the evolution of their life history.
The key findings of the study are:
Unlike other species, male African elephants invest increasing energy into reproduction as they age. Male elephants move faster and cover greater distances during the mating season as they grow older. Fifty-year-old male elephants moved 50% faster and twice as far as 35-year-old counterparts. Compared to 20-year-olds, who are not yet fully reproductively capable, the 50-year-old bulls also moved twice as fast and covered more than three times the distance. At the same time, elephants move less outside the mating season as they age.
Lucy A. Taylor et al. Movement reveals reproductive tactics in male elephants,Journal of Animal Ecology (2019). DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.13035
