Elephants Will Cooperate to Get Food -- If There's Enough to Share

A new paper examines how elephants work together to solve a task and when cooperation breaks down. View in browser

Image credits: Shutterstock Elephants Will Cooperate to Get Food -- If There's Enough to Share A new paper examines how elephants work together to solve a task and when cooperation breaks down. Katharine Gammon, Contributor September 28, 2021                                                                                                                                                                                (Inside Science) -- Cooperation lies at the beating heart of most societies. For Asian elephants in a recent study, a bit of teamwork helped them access delicious bananas. A new study examines elephants' ability to work together for a reward and the circumstances that limit their capacity for cooperation. Li-Li Li, a doctoral student at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said she chose to work on elephants because she had always longed to work with the biggest animals on the planet. Li and her colleagues also wanted to understand what motivated cooperation. Elephants, evolutionarily distant from primates, were a perfect vehicle for studying how cooperation could crop up in distant species. Back in 2011, a group of researchers published a paper showing that Asian elephants in Thailand could cooperate to obtain food rewards on an out-of-reach table, using a rope they had to pull... Read more Copyright 2021 American Institute of Physics. Inside Science syndicates its articles, columns, blogs and videos to news organizations. To initiate syndication, or request permission to republish our content (on a one-time or continuing basis), please contact Inside Science at insidescience@aip.org. News organizations seeking permission to republish Inside Science content must fully credit Inside Science as the original source of the content, include the author byline, and republish the original, unaltered form (excluding content titles, headlines, or sub-headlines). The reprint format can be seen here. Copyright conditions and usage terms are subject to change at any time without consent or any type of prior notice. To unsubscribe from all future mailings from Inside Science please click here. To manage your email subscriptions please click here.

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