Elephants turn a hose into a sophisticated shower tool

Nov. 8 () –

New research has highlighted elephants’ remarkable ability to use a hose like a flexible shower headand even to cut off the water from it.

“Elephants are amazing with hoses“says Michael Brecht of Humboldt University of Berlin, one of the lead authors of the study, which publishes Current Biology. “As is often the case with elephants, hose tool-using behaviors manifest very differently from animal to animal; Elephant Mary is the queen of the shower.”

The researchers made the discovery after the paper’s other lead author, Lena Kaufmann, also of Humboldt University Berlin, witnessed Asian elephant Mary at the Berlin Zoo taking a shower one day and recorded it on video. Mary took it to her colleagues, who were immediately impressed. The study’s first author, Lea Urban, decided to analyze the behavior in more detail.

“I hadn’t thought much about hoses as tools before, but what emerged from Lea’s work is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools“says Brecht.

Investigators discovered that Mary systematically showers her body, coordinating the water hose with her limbs. Usually grab the hose behind the tip to use it as a rigid shower head. To reach his back, switch to a lasso strategy, gripping the hose higher and swinging it over his body. When presented with a larger, heavier hose, Mary used her trunk to wash herself instead of the bulkier, less useful hose.

Researchers say findings offer new example of goal-directed tool use. But what surprised them most was the way their fellow Asian elephant Anchali reacted during Mary’s shower.

DELIBERATELY CUT OFF THE WATER

The two elephants showed aggressive interactions around shower time, the researchers say. At one point, Anchali began pulling the hose toward herself and away from Mary, lifting and bending it to stop the flow of water. Although they cannot be sure of Anchali’s intentions, it seemed very much as if the elephant was displaying some sort of second-order tool-using behavior, rendering useless a tool that another elephant used more conventionallyperhaps as an act of sabotage.

“The surprise was certainly Anchali’s behavior of bending and holding the hose,” says Brecht. “No one had thought he was smart enough to pull off such a stunt.”

In fact, he reports that there was a lot of debate in the lab about Anchali’s behavior and what it meant. Then, they saw that Anchali found another way to interrupt Mary’s shower. In this case, Anchali made what researchers call a “support log” to stop the flow of water. For this feat, Anchali places her trunk over the hose and then lowers her huge body onto it.

Brecht explains that the elephants are well trained not to step on the hoses, for fear of being scolded by their keepers. As a result, he says, they almost never do. Researchers suspect that’s why Anchali has found more challenging solutions to stop the flow of water during Mary’s showers.

“When Anchali devised a second behavior that interrupted the flow of water to Mary, I became pretty convinced he was trying to sabotage Mary.“Brecht said.

The findings are a reminder of the extraordinary manipulative skill and tool use of elephants, made possible by the grasping ability of their trunks. Researchers say they are now wondering what the findings in the zoo elephants mean for elephants in their natural environments.