Thirteen contributors are students from the East Side Middle School in
New York, and their participation marked one of the first times that
teenagers have co-authored a scientific article alongside researchers
with advanced degrees.
The research,
which appeared in April in the journal PLoS One, centered on whether
elephants understood hand gestures from humans. But by including the
young people in the study, Joshua Plotnik, the lead researcher, was
essentially conducting an experiment within an experiment: Can young
students, with their fresh eyes and questioning minds, help unlock the
inner workings of the elephant mind?
“A 12-year-old kid is inquisitive, motivated, enthusiastic and extremely impressionable,” Mr. Plotnik said in an interview in Thailand,
where he is a lecturer at Mahidol University and is helping design
after-school activities for Thai students on elephant conservation.
“They can think about it from simple but important ways.”
Mr. Plotnik is one of a handful of animal behavior specialists focusing
on elephants, whom he describes as belonging to the animal kingdom’s
“cognitive elite.”
His previous work includes research that showed that some elephants are
capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, a rare trait shared by a
small group of animals including the great apes, dolphins and the
magpie.
Frans B.M. de Waal, a prominent animal behavior specialist at Emory
University in Atlanta, says Mr. Plotnik’s mirror study and other
experiments involving tool use suggest that elephants may be able to
perform on the level of apes in certain tasks. But elephant behavior
studies are still at an early stage, he said.
“Everyone seems to know how smart elephants are, but science really does
not have a lot of hard evidence in this regard,” Mr. de Waal said.
In choosing middle-school students as his partners, Mr. Plotnik had two
purposes, he said. He drew on their analytical skills “not corrupted by
the academic environment.” And as an evangelist for the need for
conservation, he helped instill in young people the urgency of declining
elephant herds.
The number of elephants in Africa and Asia has fallen sharply over the
past century, as poachers in Africa kill elephants for ivory and human
civilization encroaches on the habitats of elephants in South and
Southeast Asia.
James Hill, one of the older students involved in the research (he was
15 years old when the project began in 2010), said the project gave him
an affection for the animals and a greater concern about their
well-being.
“I was a bit of a conservationist before, but not as much as now,” Mr.
Hill said by telephone. “I had a very passive idea that conservation was
something that society should be doing. But I wasn’t concerned that it
was a critical situation — which it really is. Afterwards I realized how
much individual responsibility everybody has.”
Mr. Plotnik and the students devised a number of experiments on elephant
behavior. The one that led to the published article involved seven
captive elephants in northern Thailand who were shown two buckets, only
one of which contained food. Mr. Plotnik or the elephant’s handler,
known as a mahout, stood behind the buckets, pointing to the one with
food.
Mr. Plotnik filmed the experiments and sent video to the students in New
York, who analyzed and suggested refinements. He would also communicate
with the group periodically via Skype to discuss the research.
“I’m not going to say that middle schoolers had the most influence on
how the experiment ended up,” said Dannah Seecoomar, who was in the
sixth grade when the project started. “But we were able to make a
contribution. It’s always a great feeling to know that you’re involved
in something bigger than yourself.”
As part of their research the students acted out a mock scenario of a
clash between farmers and elephants and how elephants react to threats
to their food supply and their young.
“It’s clear that their emotions are so much deeper than we recognize,”
Ms. Seecoomar, who is now 13 years old, said of elephants.
Elephants are one of a small number of animals capable of heightened
empathy, Mr. Plotnik said. They show emotional distress when a member of
their herd are in danger or injured and they have been known to behave
differently when arriving at a spot where family members died.
During his research, Mr. Plotnik consulted with mahouts, drawing on
their centuries of accumulated knowledge and traditions training
elephants. In the bucket experiment the mahouts predicted — wrongly it
turns out — that elephants would follow exclusively visual cues from
humans.
Mr. Plotnik said the experiment and others he is conducting underline
how much elephants rely on sound and smell — and much less sight.
Only when trainers used voice commands in conjunction with the hand
signals did the elephants chose the correct bucket of food.
Mr. de Waal, who has read the study but was not involved in the
research, called the paper “intriguing” and part of what he described as
an intense debate on the role domestication plays in interaction with
humans.
Mr. Plotnik says the research might be helpful in designing barriers
that use sound or smell to protect people from marauding wild elephants
hunting for food. One idea that has emerged from research in Africa is
that beehives might be a good deterrent; elephants have been shown to be
afraid of bees and can hear the buzzing.
For Mr. Hill, the student, the experiment made him realize the importance of getting inside an elephant’s head.
“It made elephants startlingly more complex to me,” he said. “You have to approach an elephant in an elephant way.”
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