Elephant’s Smell of Fear

It is known that elephants do not forget things that easily, but what is interesting and not known is that they are equipped with some brain power that enables them to be able to distinguish between friends and foes using the sense of smell. Studies show that pachyderms are able to perform this task at ease, they can figure out their threatening groups from those animals that mean no harm.

This particular research was conducted in Kenya, where researches set up experiments to test whether the pachyderms were able to distinguish between the Maasai tribesmen, who slay elephants from the farmers who work there, who are thought to leave these animals in peace. They presented the elephants specifically with identical red garments that these two different groups wore for about four or five days. The elephants were able to distinguish the smell of the different groups. They turned around and ran away once they smelt the Maasai’s clothes, but did not have much of a reaction when they smelt the clothes of the farmers. Also they found out that the elephants were aggressive towards unworn clothes of the Maasai tripe but they were not receptive to odorless white garments from the same clan.

"It tells us a bit about how elephants classify the world," says evolutionary psychologist Richard Byrne of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "Instead of treating humans as all one set, they're able to discriminate within one set.” Usually this behavior is observed in humans, but it is quite fascinating to see it in animals.

This sense of smell is used by elephants not only for their enemies, but also among themselves. They usually are able to determine if another elephant is a stranger or an old friend. "It's an innovative way of getting at the problem" of what animals know about their environments, says Karen McComb, an expert in mammal communication and cognition at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. "The response is very appropriate to knowing what the threat was. It's suggesting they have some sort of reasonably advanced understanding of the sorts of cues that are going to be dangers."

No one has really tested so far as to what sort of biological activity triggers this particular type of action. They are not sure if there is some sort of gene that activates such a behavior, or if it’s a learned behavior. These questions would pave way to more research that can be performed to find out what really is the ultimate cause of such unusual but useful behavior in these elephants.

Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=B4F19421-0EA5-62AE-89758AC94F723D17&chanID=sa003

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Kirubakaran Sivagurunathan (4)