Elephants: Grand Matriarchs of Amboseli
Updated: Dec 30, 2020
It's a national park in Kenya, but it may as well be heaven on earth, at least for the animals.
The name of the park is Amboseli and it's nothing if not spectacular. Mount Kilimanjaro is in the background, in Tanzania, across the southern border of Kenya. The landscape is flat and filled with short grasses, making it one of the best places for wildlife viewing.
In 1967, Cynthia Moss, then a twenty-seven-year-old working as a reporter and researcher for Newsweek, took a leave of absence to visit Africa. Upon arriving, Cynthia Moss says - "I had this overwhelming sense that I had come home." When she went to Tanzania, to meet Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a British elephant researcher, she says she "became completely hooked on elephants". And so, from that start, for the next four or five decades, Cynthia Moss went on to study wild African elephants in the same way Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees.
Cynthia Moss worked with Iain Douglas-Hamilton, for two years until he returned to Britain, after which, she began the Amboseli Elephant Research Project. Fifty years since then, this project - the Amboseli Elephant Research - is the longest running study of wild elephants.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton had found that the leader of an elephant family group is the *oldest* female - the matriarch. The elephant family group, which forms a true community, play, eat, and rest together. They group consists of several adult females and younger elephants and the calves. Adult males live in separate groups, with looser bonds, who come to visit family groups during mating times only.
Cynthia Moss backed up Douglas-Hamilton's work with more detail over the next fifty years.
Cynthia Moss found that the 'Family Group' is the smallest unit of elephant groups. Several 'Family Groups' combine to form the 'Bond Group' and several 'Bond Groups' unite to form 'Clans'. When different 'Family Groups' meet within a 'Bond Group', they have an elaborate greeting ceremony, but when different 'Clan Groups' meet, there is no greeting ceremony.
Given we know this today, it is difficult to imagine that as little as fifty years ago, we did not know that, i.e., how an elephant thrived in its own community. So, let's unpack this...
There is the elephants' family structure: Women only. In a 'family' unit.
Led by the 'Matriarch', who is the wisest and oldest.
Kids live together, play together, rest together, protected by not just its own mother, but all the women, a combination of baby-sitters, aunts, friends, and family. When a baby elephant is in distress, as they often are, they squeal, and ALL the females rush in to help the baby, to the extent that sometimes, the mother cannot get to her child. The baby elephants learn to be an elephant from the females in the family unit. They learn how to shake their heads to be rid of bees, how to charge at a lion, and how to slosh in a lake and cover themselves in mud. They learn what grasses to eat, how to use their trunks, and how to live in their family group.
The males live separately. They do not move with the family group. They are not responsible for food, water, traveling, and safety of the babies and mothers of the herd. The Matriarch is.
In other words, the Matriarch is *key* in the successful nurturing of elephants in her Family.
The loss of a Matriarch is devastating. What she has, with her 50 to 70 years of accumulated knowledge of the landscape and terrain, is the ability to keep the herd safe during times of drought and famine. When a magnificent elephant is killed for its tusk, for that ivory that is used in jewelry, it is not simply the Matriarch that is lost... the whole family falls into disarray and that includes the ten to forty females, and all their babies.
Next time you look at ivory, know the cost behind it. It's not worth it. Nothing is worth that.
There have been enormous gains in the understanding of elephants from this project. These decades long studies have revealed extraordinary details about these majestic animals -
They have ways to communicate with each other and other groups.
They celebrate birth.
They mourn death of family members.
They have a sophisticated form of problem-solving with the ability to reason.
They are extremely distressed when they are lost or without their family group.
The Matriach is key in ensuring the healthy and safety of all and the nurturing of babies.
We hope you enjoyed the Matriachs of Amboseli. Email us comments: jrnsenn@gmail.com
Comments