Elephants adjust what they eat in altered habitats, signaling growing pressure - news - Mongabay

Amara: Welcome to The Long Memory — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Amara, an elephant biologist and science communicator, and this is the show where we go deep into the inner lives of the most extraordinary animals on Earth. Every episode, we follow the science into places that genuinely move me — into memory, into grief, into intelligence, into love. Today we have some remarkable stories for you: elephants showing empathy that might outstrip our own, a massive gathering of forest elephants being studied through sound and silence, and a moment of pure joy that the whole internet couldn't resist. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who help organizations thoughtfully integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses shaping the future of the silicon industry. Alright. Let's begin. Amara: MIND OF THE ELEPHANT Amara: There is a question I've been asked more times than I can count, usually by kids but honestly just as often by adults: "Are elephants really that smart?" And I always want to say — smart doesn't even begin to cover it. Let me tell you what I mean. Amara: For years now, researchers have been using A I tools to decode elephant vocalizations, and what's emerging from that work is genuinely astonishing. A recent piece in Nature laid out just how sophisticated this effort has become. Elephants produce an enormous range of sounds — rumbles, roars, trumpets, chirps — many of them in infrasound, frequencies too low for human ears to register at all. We've known for decades that they use these sounds to communicate across kilometers of savanna. But now, with machine learning models trained on thousands of hours of recorded calls, scientists are beginning to map out something that looks a lot like a complex acoustic language. Amara: These A I systems can distinguish individual elephants by voice — the way you'd recognize a friend on the phone before they even say their name. They can identify calls associated with specific social situations: a reunion between family members after time apart, a response to the smell of a predator, a low rumble that seems to function as something like a name — a specific call directed at a specific individual. That last one is particularly striking. The idea that elephants might use something like names — individual labels for one another — puts them in very select company. Dolphins do it. Some research suggests great apes might. And now elephants. Amara: What I find most profound about this A I-assisted listening is not just what we're learning about calls themselves, but what it tells us about elephant cognition. To use individualized labels, to remember them across years of separation, to update your understanding of who is in your social group and who isn't — that requires a kind of mental architecture that is genuinely complex. You need a detailed, constantly updated map of your social world. And elephants carry that map in their remarkable memories, for decades. Amara: The matriarch of a herd is often the keeper of that map in a special sense. She's lived the longest, she's heard the most voices, and research from Cynthia Moss's decades-long work in Amboseli has shown that older matriarchs are significantly better at distinguishing familiar calls from unfamiliar ones — and at leading the herd to safety when strangers approach. That's not instinct. That's accumulated knowledge. That's memory put to work. The A I tools we're building now are helping us finally hear what those elephants have always been saying to each other. And what we're hearing is: there is so much more going on in there than we ever imagined. Amara: HEART OF THE HERD Amara: I want to talk about empathy. Real empathy — not the warm fuzzy kind we attribute to animals because it makes us feel good, but the cognitively demanding, behaviorally documented kind that researchers can actually measure and argue about in peer-reviewed journals. Because a piece in Discover Magazine recently posed a question that I think deserves serious attention: could an elephant be more empathetic than a human? Amara: It sounds like a headline designed to provoke, and honestly, maybe it is a little. But the science underneath it is solid and it's worth sitting with. Empathy, in the technical sense, involves several layers. There's emotional contagion — you feel distressed when someone near you is distressed. There's empathic concern — you're motivated to do something about it. And there's what researchers call targeted helping — you actually take action that is tailored to what the other individual needs. Humans do all three. But so do elephants, and the evidence is piling up in ways that are hard to dismiss. Amara: Frans de Waal, one of the great scholars of animal emotion, documented elephant empathy in careful detail before his passing — and his work showed that elephants will go to the side of a distressed companion, often touching them gently with their trunk, making soft contact calls, sometimes just standing alongside them in what looks for all the world like keeping company in a hard moment. These behaviors show up between mothers and calves, between adult sisters, between herd members who have been together for years. And they show up remarkably quickly — elephants notice when something is wrong with someone they know, and they respond. Amara: What makes the empathy research particularly compelling is that elephants extend this behavior even to species that aren't their own. There are documented accounts of elephants responding to the distress of other animals — and to humans. And they seem to calibrate their response. A soft rumble, a gentle touch with the trunk tip — the most sensitive part of their body, lined with mechanoreceptors as fine as fingertips — directed at the individual who is suffering, not broadcast to the whole group. Amara: Now, is an elephant more empathetic than a human? I think that's probably the wrong question. Empathy isn't a single dial you can turn up or down. But what the research does suggest is that elephants have a form of empathy that is deep, flexible, targeted, and persistent across time — they remember who has been kind to them, and who has suffered, and they act on that memory. In a world where human empathy can be so easily switched off by distance or difference, there is something worth reflecting on in that. Amara: And then there's a story I have to tell you, because it's pure joy and we need that too. Recently, a video went wildly viral — you may have seen it — of an elephant who wandered into a group of kids playing football, and just... joined in. Pushed the ball with his foot, circled around, seemed completely delighted by the whole thing. The internet, as the internet does, completely lost its mind over it. And look, I'm not going to overinterpret a single video. But I will say this: play behavior in elephants is well-documented and it is meaningful. Young elephants play constantly. But older elephants play too — they engage with novel objects, they explore, they seem to experience something we can honestly call fun. Curiosity and play are markers of intelligence across the animal kingdom, and elephants have both in abundance. That elephant joining the football game wasn't an accident and it wasn't confusion. That was an animal choosing, in the moment, to engage — to participate in something happening near it that seemed interesting and enjoyable. That is a form of social intelligence. And yes, it is also just wonderful. Amara: AN ELEPHANT-AND-PEOPLE STORY Amara: I want to spend some time with two stories that are really one story, at heart — about what happens when the world elephants evolved to live in changes faster than they can adapt. And about the humans who are paying careful attention. Amara: The first piece comes from Mongabay, which reported on something researchers have been tracking with growing concern: elephants in altered habitats are changing what they eat. In areas where forests have been cleared, where agricultural land has replaced the vegetation elephants historically relied on, herds are shifting their diets — eating crops, eating species they wouldn't normally choose, ranging further and into riskier territory to find enough food. And this isn't just a conservation footnote. It's a signal. Elephants are dietary specialists in important ways — they need enormous quantities of food, up to 300 pounds a day for an adult, and they prefer specific vegetation. When they start substituting, it means the landscape has been pushed past the point where it can sustain them as it once did. Amara: What strikes me about this research is that it's the elephants telling us something, through their behavior. They're not giving up. They're adapting, they're solving the problem in front of them the way elephants always have — by using their intelligence and their memory of the landscape to find alternatives. But adaptation has limits. And the pressure, as the researchers put it, is growing. Amara: The second story takes us to central Africa, where a team of researchers is conducting what might be the most ambitious acoustic study of elephants ever attempted — monitoring the world's largest known gathering of forest elephants. African forest elephants are a distinct species from their savanna cousins — smaller, more elusive, living in the dense rainforests of the Congo Basin and West Africa. They're also critically endangered, and in many ways, deeply understudied, precisely because dense forest makes observation so difficult. But this gathering — a place called a bai, a natural forest clearing — draws hundreds of elephants at a time, and the research team is combining field observation with sophisticated acoustic monitoring to try to understand what's happening there. Amara: What are forest elephants doing when they gather like this? It seems to be partly about resources — mineral-rich soil and water in the clearing. But it's also social. These animals travel sometimes extraordinary distances to reach these bais, and when they arrive, something complex and coordinated unfolds. Families reunite. Young animals meet others outside their immediate group. There are interactions that look like negotiation, like greeting, like the re-establishment of relationships that might go back years or decades. Amara: And the acoustic data is capturing all of it — every rumble and trumpet and low-frequency call that ripples through that forest. Researchers are building a library of forest elephant communication that has never existed before. And that library matters. Because to protect a species, you have to understand it. You have to know how it moves, how it communicates, what it needs, who it knows. Forest elephants have been poached catastrophically over the past few decades — their populations have declined by more than 80% in under 30 years. That is an emergency. But it is also a story with people in it who are working with extraordinary dedication to understand these animals before it is too late — and to give the world the information it needs to protect them. Amara: What connects these two stories, for me, is a kind of listening. In altered habitats, if we watch carefully enough, the elephants will tell us through their behavior how much pressure they're under. In the forests of central Africa, if we listen carefully enough — with human ears and A I ears both — the elephants will tell us who they are. The work, in both cases, is to pay attention. To take seriously the signals that are right in front of us. Elephants have been doing that for each other for millions of years. The least we can do is try to do the same for them. Amara: And that's what sits with me at the end of every episode of this show — the scale of what elephants carry. Not just physically, though yes, they are magnificent in that way too. But the weight of memory. A matriarch who has lived sixty years holds within her the map of every waterhole, every migration route, every friend and every loss her family has known. She holds the social history of her herd. She holds the knowledge of a landscape. And she shares it — generously, instinctively — because that is what it means to be an elephant. Knowledge is for the group. Memory is a gift you give. Amara: We are at the beginning of understanding these animals. And the more we learn, the more we owe them — our attention, our care, and our willingness to change the way we share this world. Amara: This has been The Long Memory, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you to each of them for making this show possible. If today's stories moved you — if you want to carry a little more of the elephant world with you — please subscribe, and share the show with someone who you think would love it. It genuinely helps more than you know. All the sources and further reading for today's episode are in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time.