African Elephant Play, Competence and Social Complexity

Abstract

Play in African elephants (Loxodonta africana) is a life-long activity, with both males and females engaging in a variety of forms of play into their 40s and 50s.Play represents a potentially enriching social and physical activity for elephants, but also one with energetic costs and other risks.Having followed a cohort of individually recognized elephants from birth to adulthood in Amboseli, Kenya, we suggest here some long-term consequences for the role of play in the development of social and physical skills in elephants.Playful elephant calves appeared to be individuals with greater capacity to resist growth insults or stresses and had a reduced risk of dying as adults.The sexes differed in the social contexts and consequences of their early play experiences.Juvenile males used play as a mechanism to enable relaxed contacts with relative strangers, providing vital physical and behavioral information about future friends, associates and reproductive competitors.Females, by contrast, used play as one of the many mechanism for sustaining their social, protective and leadership roles within families. Keywords -Early experiences; Survival consequences; Sex differences in play, EnergeticsPlay remains a behavior of considerable fascination, even though we lack a detailed understanding of play's costs and consequences during the developmental period or for later life.Positive immediate physiological and psychological benefits of play can be demonstrated for infants and juveniles, such as enhanced motor-training and neural connectivity (Pellis, Pellis, & Bell, 2010) and the development of social skills such as turn-taking or dominance acquisition (Lee, 1983).Play acts as an additional stimulus for managing social and environmental unpredictability (Spinka, Newberry, & Bekoff, 2001) and provides opportunities for seeking out novelty through a process that Wood-Gush and Vestergaard (1991) called "inquisitive investigation."Play, through investigation and interaction, thus enhances the capacity to manage responses to the unexpected.Along with these benefits, however, come costs.While not always energetically demanding, play disappears at the first sign of energy or social stress (e.g., Sharpe, Clutton-Brock, Brotherton, Cameron, & Cherry, 2002).Play is also a high-risk interaction, as demonstrated by observations of injuries or predation attempts during play (Harcourt, 1991), while chimpanzee infants who played more were more likely to contract Ebola (Kuehl, Elzner, Moebius, Boesch, & Walsh, 2008).Play still has direct survival benefits for some juveniles; brown bears that played more had higher early survival, independent of maternal care (Fagen & Fagen, 2009).Given the debates about the diverse functions of play at various ages and for a plethora of species (e.g., Burghardt, 2005), it is not surprising that we have so few unambiguous examples of play's consequences beyond the juvenile period.Therefore understanding the expression of play in a range of cognitively complex and long-lived species such as parrots (Diamond & Bond, 2003), primates (Palagi, Cordoni, & Tarli, 2004), dolphins (Kuczaj, Makecha, Trone, Paulos, & Ramos, 2006) and elephants might help us to determine whether any longer term benefits exist.For species such as elephants, the very

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 68 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.