Friends and Relations
Sometimes elephants go wandering off alone or in small groups away from the herd. They may have found a particularly tasty treat they want to eat, or they might have had a fight with a relative and sulked off with their tail between their legs for a while. It’s common for elephants to do their own thing for a night or two, but more often than not they go back to find their family or friends, and one of the most heartwarming sights I’ve seen in Africa is when elephants are reunited after time apart.
Once, when I was on a horseback safari in the Kenyan highlands, I spotted a herd of elephants grazing on the side of a hill on the far side of a river. As we were cantering along, I noticed three more elephants suddenly emerging from a eucalyptus forest to my right. At first, I didn’t know if they were two distinct groups; perhaps they were competing for food, and I wondered if there would be trouble. To start with, the two parties raised their trunks, sniffing the air to confirm whether they were friends or not, and I pulled on the reins to stop and observe.
The newcomers dramatically rushed forwards, trumpeting, flapping their ears and shaking their heads, as they splashed right through the shallow river and ran up the hill towards the other group. I prepared myself for the commotion and feared for the safety of a tiny calf, who began to whirl around chaotically. I needn’t have worried. As it turned out, they seemed to be on rather good terms. The matriarch of the herd, the oldest and most experienced female, led what can only be described as joyful celebrations, signalling her welcome with a series of loud calls, as the rest of the group followed in the excitement.
Some of the younger calves began spinning around and running in circles and I noticed that many of them were even peeing themselves in a state of raw excitement. When the two groups got close enough, they all began touching and caressing each other with their trunks, in almost the same way that people shake hands or kiss. Clearly, elephants have no problem showing a bit of public affection! The outpouring of emotion was quite unashamed and I felt no doubt in my mind at that moment that these magnificent beasts were happy, in the purest sense of the word, and must have missed each other when they were apart.
Relationships are what make elephants tick. Just as their large body size is closely linked with how they feed and move around, their need for interaction and companionship is fundamental to understanding the nature of an elephant and how it behaves.
Feeding and ecology – what they eat, where they move, when they rest – is clearly very important to appreciating elephant behaviour, but it would be impossible to comprehend elephants properly without also thinking about their social lives. Elephants may spend three-quarters of their day eating, but with the exception of mature adult males, they are hardly ever doing so alone, instead being almost constantly in the company of relatives or friends.
These relationships are so strong that elephants have frequently been reported as neglecting their own nutritional requirements for many hours or days to remain close to ill or dying companions, often risking severe dehydration to keep circling scavengers at bay. Their dedication to each other is truly remarkable.
Most mammals are not social – at least not in the sense of permanently living and socialising with the same individuals, day after day and year after year. But elephants are not most mammals. Elephants have a very strong sense of society, the foundation of which is the mother–infant bond. All relationships, associations and behaviour radiate out from this core, even though as adults, males and females have rather different social lives. For females, life continues to centre on the family; whereas for males the dynamics may change with age and sexual status, but their relationships with others remain crucial.
Female calves typically remain with their mothers for life, resulting in matrilineal family groups composed of mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, granddaughters, nieces and cousins of multiple generations. These close-knit families are characterised by persistent and strong social bonds between individuals, and these individuals typically coordinate their activities so that they are all feeding, moving, resting or socialising together.
Families within the Amboseli National Park population of Kenya, undoubtedly the best-studied elephant population in the world, have been recorded as containing anything up to fifty elephants, although they typically number around twenty individuals with an average of seven adult females.§ Whilst these families are very close – both socially and genetically – membership is not always static. Female elephants occasionally choose their own families, and there are some unusual cases of unrelated females being fully integrated into a new herd, and other odd examples of females splitting off with unrelated females to form new groups, but it’s very rare indeed to see a female elephant alone. They are highly sociable creatures and seem to need the company of others to thrive.
Elephant families grow or shrink in number because of births, deaths and the departure of adolescent males, but when individual females do sometimes split off and join with others it is usually only temporary, and with good reason. Splits allow a family to cope with varying environmental conditions such as seasonal food shortages, because they can separate to search for food or water in different areas, and then reunite later when they have had enough to eat, or have found a patch of food that can support the whole group. Interestingly, this type of social organisation is also shared by some whale and dolphin species, chimpanzees, several monkeys, and of course, human societies.
What’s more, individuals from one family may associate with elephants from other families, often blood relations, and together these two or three related families form a bond group. It doesn’t stop there, though. The layers of female society build up further with several bond groups forming a clan, and multiple clans making a sub-population, which in turn create regional populations. Some groupings meet up frequently, and others only occasionally, all subject to the size and density of the population and the availability of resources.
Adult females are constantly thinking about where to eat and drink, how far to walk and who they want to spend time with. That’s a lot of decision-making, and as in any society, too many cooks spoil the broth. If all the adult elephants in a breeding herd had their own way, then chaos would doubtless ensue as the females argued and acted in their own interests, or in the interests of their own calves. Instead, somehow they manage to cooperate, act in unison, and in a very efficient manner. So how is this achieved?
Elephant society is generally viewed as accommodating, inclusive and egalitarian, but what holds it all together is solid leadership, and when there’s a need for leadership, it usually comes from the matriarch. For most actions, most of the time, it’s her decision that’s final. That’s not to say there isn’t a fair amount of negotiation, and when other females can’t abide the boss, they can always storm off temporarily, or even for good. But for the most part, individuals in breeding herds respect their leaders, and will follow them anywhere.
As I walked with herds across Botswana, it was fascinating to see the courage and leadership demonstrated by matriarchs in all sorts of different scenarios. In the dry season, elephants are forced to travel vast distances across barren salt plains and parts of the Kalahari Desert. Driven on by thirst, they march hundreds of miles across the parched plains. The matriarchs lead the way, having made this journey countless times before. But these elephants are not the only animals in search of water, so on finding a watering hole, they often have no choice but to share it with all kinds of other wildlife, even lions, who are not averse to preying on young elephant calves.
I remember watching with the utmost respect as a pride of lions approached a pool on the edge of the Makgadikgadi, where one herd of elephants was drinking at dusk. By day, the elephants dominate the water hole, but as night falls, the power balance shifts; with their poor eyesight, the hulking creatures are at a disadvantage, and the lions use the cover of darkness to sneak up on anyone wandering too far from the herd.
As soon as the matriarch caught the scent of the lions, she immediately rallied her family, resorting to pushing and shoving the babies into the middle of the herd and bossing the other females into action to form a huddle, protecting the little ones from the danger. Only when a solid defence was formed did the herd move off, the matriarch always keeping herself between her kin and the predators. It was this kind of defensive behaviour that the soldiers in Kenya had encountered, and another reminder of why one should never get in the way of an elephant mother and her young.
Female elephants can spend forty or even fifty years producing and raising calves. Yes, that is five decades rearing children. As mentioned earlier, the female will also be suckling her current calf throughout the four- or five-year period between births, with the older one often being stopped from nursing only when the newborn arrives.
These figures and time periods all add up to one thing: a female elephant can spend virtually all of her adult life either pregnant, lactating, or both.
Even with this colossal dedication to raising young by any one female, the old adage of ‘it takes a village’ is perhaps truest for elephants. The whole family shoulders a huge amount of responsibility for all calves born into it. Juvenile females will usually babysit calves, following them around, touching and caressing them, steering them away from danger and keeping them close to the family group. Younger, less-experienced mothers seem to follow and learn from the older, wiser females how best to raise their babies.
Motherhood is a steep learning curve for elephants, even those with a lot of babysitting experience. As we might expect, whether a young calf lives or dies depends to a large extent on external factors such as droughts, predator attacks, and conflict with humans. But it also depends very much on the knowledge, experience and social situation of the mother.
A mother has to understand and assess the needs of her calf. She has to know when the demands for milk are necessary, or merely greedy. She has to know when the ‘distress bellow’ is genuine or only playful; or when the calf really can’t keep up with the pace anymore, compared to when it is being a bit lazy. First-time elephant mothers are often not very good at it.
A calf from a large family with a lot of young females that can act as babysitters, as well as older females that can provide guidance, is much more likely to survive past the age of two than a calf born into a small family without many female relatives. In fact, adult females with surviving mothers are more successful in their own reproductive lives, producing calves sooner and for longer than those whose mothers are dead.
Having a grandmother on hand also makes elephant mothers better. And of course, the age and experience of the best grandmother of all, the matriarch, is hugely important. Calves born into families with older matriarchs have even better chances of survival. Calves – and their mothers – need sisters, cousins, aunts and experienced grandmothers to help them make it to adulthood.
Even with all this help from family members, calves remain dedicated to their own mothers, and up to around ten years of age will frequently call to her and touch her, reaffirming their bond. For the first couple of months of life, infant calves rarely tend to be more than a trunk-length away from their mother. This distance gradually increases as they grow in size and confidence, but there are some differences between male and female calves.
Females move away from their mothers towards other female family members, whereas males prefer novelty. They are much more likely to move toward and play with elephants from other families, ideally males their own age or older. This does present dangers for male calves, though, and they are much more likely to become separated from their family or encounter predators, which certainly contributes to the greater likelihood of death that is recorded for male calves of all ages. On average, their more adventurous nature and greater nutritional requirements make it harder for elephant mothers to rear males successfully.
Young elephants love to play. Calves of both sexes spend a lot of time frolicking around and exploring, and anyone that’s been lucky enough to spend time with them knows that they can be very entertaining to watch. They love a good water fight and will often spray each other at the river for a bit of fun. Sometimes they play on their own, practising physical skills such as how to use their trunks effectively, which often seems to involve waving it round and round their heads like a ribbon; or playing with objects they find such as sticks, logs or stones – carrying them, balancing them on their heads or trunks, or scratching with them. Sometimes they play with other animals; chasing and generally tormenting anything in their path, be it egret, warthog or wildebeest. And best of all, they play with other elephants.
Whenever I’m passing through Nairobi in Kenya, I always make sure to visit the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage, where dozens of rescued babies are looked after. It makes for a heart-melting experience. Every afternoon they come charging from the forest enclosure to be fed milk from bottles by the wildlife staff, but on the way the little elephants can’t help but mess around; tripping each other up on purpose, or rolling down the hill causing a pile-up. I even watched one try to climb onto the other’s head, just for fun. Once the milking was over, one particularly mischievous boy decided that my face would make for great target practice, picking up a piece of his poo and throwing it right at me, much to his human keeper’s entertainment.
Play is an important source of learning and experience for calves and has long-term consequences for the development of their social and physical skills. For females, social play is one way to enhance their family relationships and to practise their mothering skills; for males, it is a way to begin building their social network with individuals that they will spend much of their adult life being with. But when scientists looked at data that followed a group of Amboseli elephants from birth to middle age, it became apparent exactly how important play is. Amazingly, they found that more playful calves lived longer as adults. Playing is not simply fun, it can increase an elephant’s lifespan.
One of the main ways that play may help the calves is it allows them to learn how to communicate with other elephants. Elephants are constantly communicating with others, using visual gestures and vocal calls, as well as scent cues in urine and other secretions. With their large ears that can be moved, flapped, folded and wiggled, and their incredibly mobile and dextrous trunks, elephants can form a huge number of postures. Over a hundred gestures, postures and behaviours have been described that elephants perform and seem to have a meaning for those elephants who observe them – and for us watching, too, if we pay close enough attention.
These gestures vary from the subtle ear fold, which signifies anger or aggression, to the overt and obvious let’s go sequence displayed by individuals who are trying to lead or direct the group in a particular direction. This latter action involves an individual standing on the periphery of the group, facing the direction in which they want to travel, perhaps with a front foot lifted or in front of the other, head up, and making a deep, low rumbling call every minute or so; looking back over the shoulder to check on the activity of those behind. As soon as the lead individual, who is usually the matriarch, has the attention of those behind, they will move off in the indicated direction, checking that the others are moving, too.
There are many gestures in an elephant’s repertoire, and these can indicate a range of emotions that show everything from aggression and apprehension to friendliness, joy, and of course, their sexual intentions. However, we still know precious little about how exactly these visual signals work and the importance of the part they play in communication.
Given the way in which elephants’ social lives operate and the fact that they often go wandering off alone, they must clearly find some way of keeping in touch with others whom they cannot see. Elephants are known to leave ‘messages’ in the form of scent cues via secretions from the temporal glands, as well as in their faeces and urine. But equally intriguing are the noises they emit, and scientists are beginning to explore the question of whether elephants can in fact ‘talk’ to each other with the same levels of sophistication as other big-brained mammals such as chimpanzees and dolphins.
Elephants can make different kinds of vocalisations. They’re probably most famous for their trumpeting, a sound created by blasting air through the trunk. But even more impressive is their ability to generate deep rumbles, which resonate through the larynx all the way up to the nasal passages of the skull. Where trumpet calls are emotional sounds – often used by calves when playing, or when an adult feels threatened or in distress – rumbles seem to be given to maintain and reinforce social bonds, as well as to communicate intent.
One particular type of rumble vocalisation – contact rumbles – appears to be used for long-distance communication. Research in Amboseli has shown that female elephants are familiar with, and can discriminate between, the contact rumbles made by a mind-boggling more than 100 other elephants! And they can even recognise the caller from sounds heard at distances of up to two and a half kilometres away. Males can also discriminate between the contact rumbles of familiar and unfamiliar females, moving toward the unfamiliar females as part of their constant search for new mates.
These contact rumbles are low-frequency calls that have a deep, resonating sound. This kind of rumble can also be transmitted seismically – through or along the surface of the ground. Studies conducted in Kenya and Namibia suggest that elephants may be able to pick up these sounds through vibrations in the ground using sensors in their feet and trunks. Some scientists have even speculated that these rumbling communications might be transmitted over distances in excess of twenty kilometres! If this is true, ‘messages’ might be passed from one herd to another over vast distances, which might explain how these enigmatic animals can ‘sense’ danger quickly from far away.
Other sounds made inadvertently by elephants or from different sources could potentially also be detected in the same way. For example, a group of elephants rapidly running away from danger would create considerable seismic vibrations, as perhaps would distant thunder, or even tsunamis, which may explain the observation of Asian elephants running to high ground long before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit land.
One filmmaker describes seeing a family walking steadily across a dry lakebed in Amboseli. Suddenly, all the elephants stopped and stood completely still, with several resting their trunks on the ground – all looked as if they were in some kind of trance state of heightened concentration. After a few minutes, they relaxed, but all walked off in a direction at ninety degrees to their original path. Detecting distant sounds – and recognising something salient in them – is surely the most likely explanation for such sequences that are observed fairly commonly in elephants, but we still have a lot to learn before we can understand these almost telepathic abilities.
Until recently, it was thought that male elephants were fairly solitary creatures, but studies in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa have shown that is really not the case. Male social life falls into distinct periods. Male calves are born into female groups and remain with their family until adolescence, then when they are around fourteen years of age, these males start to move further away from their female kin to begin the process of becoming fully independent and establishing themselves in male society.
Gaining independence is a gradual process, taking place over several months. It was believed that independence was forced upon teenage males by their increasingly intolerant family, but – as ever with elephants – it seems that the individual’s experience, maturity, personality, and relationships with his family and wider society all impact the decision to leave: a boy can’t be rushed.
As they grow in confidence, young males explore wider areas in search of food, water and companions, and as time passes, they prefer to be close to other males and start to establish new friendship ‘gangs’ – bachelor groups. These young males can often be seen testing their strength against their peers, in friendly and not-always-quite-so-friendly sparring interactions: play fights can sometimes turn ugly.
The play fights and sparring of childhood and adolescence can determine dominance hierarchies that shape much of adult male life. Dominance is generally based on size – and therefore age – and strength. Older, larger males will take priority over subordinate males for access to food or water, and low-level aggression is not uncommon between males. But dominance hierarchies are most apparent when the stakes are high, that is, when resources are scarce.
In unusually wet years when water is plentiful, males in Etosha National Park, Namibia, display a lot of greedy pushing and shoving to get to watering holes. In drought years, however, the same males queue politely, waiting their turn to drink after more dominant individuals. They seem to realise that pushing ahead when the resource is so precious could result in serious fighting, and that is simply not worth the risk.
As males establish their place in society, they tend to live in areas that can be slightly removed from those in which family groups roam. In these bull areas, males form groups with others that can range in number from only two or three males together, to large groups of twenty or more. Some males are very gregarious, spending much of their time in the company of other males when not sexually active, while others prefer to spend more time by themselves. So just like humans, some are more extrovert and others more solitary. However, even large, old males typically have at least one long-term friend.
From late adolescence, keen young males will start attempting to pursue and mate with females. But these sexual interactions are rare and opportunistic. Then at some point usually in their mid to late twenties, adult males begin to enter their annual ‘musth’ phases.¶
During these periods, males become considerably more aggressive, eating little yet wandering far and wide in search of females who might be receptive to their advances. A male’s behaviour changes drastically between his normal, non-musth life and the musth phases, moving from the low-level, social jostling of the bull areas, to competing fiercely with any other male in his path for exclusive access to females.
Males can detect if a female is receptive to mating by the chemical signature of her urine, and also by the visual signals she gives him – essentially a flirty walk, wiggling her hips, and with a head movement that is akin to a wink and a hair flick. Musth males will chase non-musth males away from families that contain females giving off such signals. Musth status trumps all, so non-musth males always concede, even if they are normally higher up the pecking order.
That means that smaller, younger males who are in musth will dominate larger males who are not in musth. And if two musth males meet and neither gives in, terrible fights can break out that may last for many hours. There will be a lot of inevitable sizing up and squaring off, but when the real clashes come, they can be so prolonged and fierce that it’s not unheard of for one of the males to be mortally wounded. To walk away with broken tusks and a few bleeding injuries would be getting off lightly.
Interestingly, the musth periods of male associates in Amboseli do not tend to overlap. Perhaps they have evolved in such a way that they avoid having to clash with their friends. Or it could be that they are only friends with males whose musth period does not overlap with theirs, which is an equally fascinating idea. Also, males who have reached the sexual and social maturity of having an annual musth phase are more likely to stick to a specific bull area when they are not in musth. We don’t know exactly why males stick to these areas, or how they choose them, but it seems likely that the security such places provide helps them to recover body condition lost during the long period when their body is ruled by testosterone.
But it would be wrong to think that only musth males leave bull areas to spend time with females in family groups. Adult males who are not in musth are still sometimes seen in the company of families. Maybe this occurs by chance or maybe some males simply want the company of a talkative, busy family for a while. Perhaps they simply get lonely wandering alone. At the moment, we don’t know for sure.
However you look at it, musth is very strange. Not merely the face-value strangeness of a three-month testosterone surge, but male elephants do not begin musth cycles until their twenties, if not their thirties. And genetic paternity tests conducted at both Amboseli and Samburu have shown that males aged between forty and fifty-five are by far the most likely to father calves. So larger, older musth males are the most reproductively active. Which may not sound very odd, until you consider the fact that the average life expectancy for male elephants is around twenty-seven years in Amboseli – and that is probably the least disturbed, best-protected elephant population on the continent. Male elephants have evolved to sire offspring at an age by which most of them will already be dead.
It is not only larger, older males that father calves, but specifically larger, older males who are in musth. To survive and fight for months on end whilst eating very little food and quickly walking huge distances means males who reach and survive through annual musth periods must be very fit indeed. Physically fit, mentally fit, but also genetically fit, with good genes that could be passed on to offspring.
For biologists, musth is therefore an ‘honest signal’ of fitness – that is a characteristic or trait related to the genetic quality of a male that cannot be faked – and female elephants probably prefer to mate with males who demonstrate this honest signal of quality.
Three-quarters of males do not live to the age of forty, yet that is the age when the surviving males can count more reliably on fathering calves. And from a female’s perspective at least, that makes perfect sense. A forty-year old male will be significantly larger and heavier than a twenty-year-old one, so more able to withstand the physical ravages of musth, not to mention being more experienced in all aspects of life. She wants only the best for her calves, and mating with older males demonstrating this honest signal of their superiority is a good rule of thumb for obtaining the best genes.
Males who have not yet reached musth age, and males who are in the non-musth phase of the annual cycle, can and do mate and father calves, but not very often. The extreme competitiveness of musth males, and the fact that females prefer these dominant individuals, means that musth males have the greatest success as fathers. So just as it is for females, males must also live a long time to produce a lot of calves. Longevity is key in both male and female elephants.
One particularly wonderful thing about wild elephants is that they also seem to accept people as part of their society. Many animals might form relationships with people – dogs and horses are prime examples – but these are typically evident either in domestic animals, or wild animals that are held in captivity and that form a relationship based on dependence on human caregivers.
Relationships with truly wild animals that are not based on any kind of feeding or provisioning are much rarer, yet almost all the researchers who have spent decades following particular populations of elephants will report a ‘special’ association with one or two of the individuals they see most often. Not simply that the researcher has a favourite whom they particularly care about or enjoy watching, as I am sure happens with almost all field biologists, but genuine two-way relationships that both human and animal seem to take pleasure in.
In his book The Elephant Whisperer, Lawrence Anthony tells the story of how he adopted a herd of ‘rogue’ elephants, who were destined to be shot because of their destructive behaviour across South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. ‘They were a difficult bunch, no question about it,’ he reflects on meeting them, ‘delinquents every one. But I could see a lot of good in them too. They’d had a tough time and were all scared and yet they were all looking after and protecting one another.’
Lawrence and his wife, Francoise, had been approached by an elephant-welfare organisation when it all became too much for the herd’s previous owners. They had space on their game reserve in the wilderness of Zululand, which, against all odds, became a conservancy for this troublesome bunch. Lawrence really was their only hope. The couple adopted the seven elephants into their family, naming the matriarch Nana, just as his children call their grandmother.
The early days were challenging. Every morning the herd tried to force their way out of the enclosure, and every day Lawrence persisted and did all he could to persuade them not to behave in this way. However, he also made it clear that despite their actions, he still cared for them and they could trust him, which given their previous experience of ownership, he expected would take a long time.
He pleaded daily with Nana not to break the fence, knowing full well that she couldn’t understand him, but hoping that his body language and the warming, soft tone of his voice was enough for her to comprehend. To keep them in their compound was crucial for their safety, because their adoption and relocation had become national news, meaning they could easily be at danger from poachers and local tribes, who resented them being on ‘their’ land.
Over the months and years, Lawrence developed a very special bond with the animals and became convinced of their ability to express empathy, not only with other elephants but also with humans, and during this time he grew especially close to the matriarch of the herd.
‘One morning, instead of trying to break down the fence, she just stood there. Then she put her trunk through the fence towards me. I knew she wanted to touch me – elephants are tremendously tactile, they use touch all the time to show concern and love. That was a turning point.’
Once Lawrence was accepted by Nana, the other elephants quickly followed suit, which proved lifesaving for him and Francoise when they inadvertently found themselves between the feistiest mother, Frankie, and her babies. She charged at the couple, only breaking off when she was seconds from crushing them. Had Nana not shown Frankie that she could trust them, they might never have survived.
The most astonishing and emotional tale of all – which really encapsulates the shared respect between the matriarch and Lawrence – is when Nana gave birth to her son Mvula. She ambled forward out of the bush, only a couple of days after the birth, with her new baby in tow, and presented him to the man she regarded as a close kinsman. A few years later, Lawrence repayed the gesture with his newborn granddaughter. In the same way that elephants celebrate a new member of their own herd, they shot their trunks up in the air to smell the scent of the baby and trumpeted in joyous unison.
For a wild animal to act with anything other than distant tolerance of a human – particularly one who is present a lot, but who never feeds them or gets directly involved in the animal’s activities – is fascinating. For the animal to call to the human, to greet them as they do others in their social network, and present their calves to them, is truly remarkable. And that’s not an isolated incident.
Probably the most enduring and endearing friendship between researcher and elephant was that between Cynthia Moss and a huge matriarch called Echo. Cynthia, who founded the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in the 1970s, named Echo early on in her research. For many years they encountered each other almost every day and spent months together as Cynthia filmed the herd in their natural environment.
Over time, Echo began to greet Cynthia in the vehicle as if she was a family member; and would even use the safari truck as an ally in potentially dangerous encounters with other elephants or lions; like she would rely on a sister. As with Anthony Lawrence and his matriarch Nana, Echo always came and presented her new calves, grand-calves, and even great-grand-calves to Cynthia – but never anyone else. If Cynthia was driving an unknown person in her vehicle, Echo could sense the stranger and would approach the car with much more caution.
It’s clear that elephants are highly social and complicated creatures, which begs the question of exactly how intelligent are they? We know they have big brains and amazing ways of communication, but how does their mind work?
§ Interestingly, Asian elephant social organisation is somewhat looser, with smaller and less coherent core groups and less connectivity at the population level than African savannah elephants.
¶ Musth was first noted and described in African elephants in 1981, by Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss – the wisest matriarchs of all in the elephant-researcher family. Until they figured out what it was, they genuinely thought the males that they were seeing wandering alone, with no interest in food (and therefore with a declining body condition), and almost constantly dribbling urine, were sick with some mystery illness. In fact, they even jokingly called this ‘illness’ Green Penis Disease, based on the distinctly unusual colour they also noticed at these times.