Elephants use more than 40 gestures to tell others to move away or stop

Wild African savannah elephants use more than 40 types of gesture to tell others to move away or stop what they are doing, checking whether their audience is watching and trying again if the message does not achieve its apparent purpose.

The findings, published in Animal Cognition, come from the first systematic investigation of intentional gestural communication in the species. They suggest that conspicuous movements such as spreading the ears or flinging the trunk are not simply displays: elephants direct them towards particular recipients and adjust their behaviour in pursuit of a goal.

Researchers spent more than 90 hours observing elephants in competitive situations in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park and Marakele National Park, recording around 840 individual instances of gesturing.

The elephants checked whether another elephant was paying attention before and during a gesture, adapted their signals to the recipient’s visual attention and waited for a response. When the response did not satisfy their apparent goal, they produced further gestures.

Lead author Dr Vesta Eleuteri said: “If you spend time observing wild elephants, you can’t help but notice their conspicuous gestures.

“They may fling their trunk or spread their ears wide, and you intuitively understand that ‘they mean business’.

“But until now, we didn’t know whether wild elephants were using these gestures to communicate intentionally.”

The team identified more than 40 gesture types, composed of 32 gesture actions, serving two main purposes: asking another elephant to move away or to stop its current activity.

The repertoire was flexible rather than a set of signals with fixed meanings. Of the 33 gesture types recorded in successful communications, 21 were used for both purposes, Dr Eleuteri said.

Such extensive and adaptable gestural communication had previously been demonstrated in apes and a few other primates. Finding it in elephants, which are evolutionarily distant from primates, suggests that sophisticated gesturing may have evolved independently in species with advanced intelligence and complex social lives, she said.

Dr Eleuteri, who undertook the research as part of her PhD at the University of Vienna in Austria, also compared the two South African populations with records in the ElephantVoices database from Kenya and Mozambique. The populations shared the same gesture types, suggesting that elephants may have a common gestural vocabulary across populations.

Study co-author Dr Lucy Bates, of the University of Portsmouth, said identifying and interpreting the signals required painstaking work. She described the number of gesture types identified as exciting, drawing a parallel with humans’ everyday use of gestures to make themselves understood.

The study focused on competitive encounters, and the researchers say further work is needed to establish how elephants gesture in other circumstances. Senior author Professor Angela Stoeger, also of the University of Vienna, said understanding their messages would require studying how acoustic, visual, tactile and seismic signals work together, alongside the context in which they occur.

The findings could also have practical implications for conservation. Dr Bates said habitat loss was bringing elephants into conflict with people, while expanding human populations in elephant range-states meant more encounters between them.

“Understanding how elephants communicate when they’re feeling threatened could help us better read their intentions or recognise when they don’t want us around, giving us the chance to move away before interactions become dangerous”.