Elephants cooperate up until food is scarce

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-09-29 04:00

International

Elephants in the Myaing Hay Wun elephant camp, Myanmar - Credit: Li-Li Li, Li L-L et al., PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0

Asian elephants will cooperate with each other to get food and have evolved strategies to minimise competition in their social groups, but their cooperation breaks down when food becomes scarce, according to international researchers. The team gave nine semi-wild Asian elephants a simple cooperative task with two food trays which could be accessed by pulling two ropes simultaneously (thus requiring two elephants). The researchers observed that the elephants used a series of 'competition mitigation' strategies to reduce competition and increase coordination in obtaining the food, with pairs of elephants cooperating in 80 per cent of trials. Unfortunately, the cooperation strategies broke down as food became more scarce, when the researchers only provided one tray of food the elephants would resort to cheating, or freeloading by stealing the reward from other pairs.

Media release

From: PLOS

Peer-reviewed Experimental study Animals

Elephants strive to cooperate with allies, until the stakes get too high

In a two-elephant rope-pulling task, cooperation broke down if one partner could monopolize the food

Asian elephants are keen to cooperate with friends and have evolved strategies to mitigate competition in their social groups, but cooperation breaks down when food resources are limited, according to a study publishing September 28th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Li-Li Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan, China, and colleagues. The study sheds light on the evolution of cooperative behavior in mammals.

The researchers tested nine semi-wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at the Myaing Hay Wun Elephant Camp in Yangon, Myanmar with a simple, open access cooperative task. The elephants were offered two trays of food, which could only be accessed by pulling two ropes simultaneously – a task requiring two trunks.

Journal/
conference: PLOS Biology

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Myanmar

Funder: This project was funded by the Lancang- Mekong Cooperation Special Fund (Biodiversity Monitoring and Network Construction along Lancang-Mekong River Basin project; Y8GK041B01) - R-C.Q., CAS-SEABRI (Y4ZK111B01) - R-C.Q., and the CAS 135 program (grant number: No. 2017 XTBG-F03) - R-C.Q. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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