It is known that a human’s emotion can very much be influenced by his social bindings. Stress, anxiety, and nervousness is largely attributed to their social behaviour.
And the same can be said about elephants also, as a new study has claimed that tuskers suffer stress and anxiety when alone rather than being in a group.
The research has revealed that loneliness increased male elephants’ levels of stress, while females were less stressed when they had babies.
The study, conducted by the University of Turku, came to the conclusion after analysing the faeces of Asian elephants in Myanmar to compare the levels of stress hormones.
The team studied 95 Asian elephants in Myanmar who were working in the timber industry.
The researchers think that compared to male elephants, lone females might still be able to interact with other individuals without forming strong social bonds and so the lack of those bonds may not be perceived as stress.
“We found that male elephants show higher levels of stress when they have no friends and when they are in social groups with more males than females,” says Martin Seltmann and professor Virpi Lummaa, co-author of the study.“Female elephants show lower levels of stress when babies are present in the social group. The size of the social group is not related to levels of stress hormones in males or females,” he added.
The team hopes the findings could be used to develop methods to improve the welfare of captive social animals in the future.
“These elephants work in the timber industry, where they pull and push logs out of the forest. However, spending much of their time free in their natural habitat allows the timber elephants to express many of their natural behaviours, which is often not the case in fully captive systems, such as zoos,” says Dr Martin Seltmann from the Department of Biology at the University of Turku, the lead author of the study.
“This is a unique research environment and population that allows us to study many elephants living in their natural environment, but at the same time have detailed information about their social lives,” he added.
