By Emily Anthes
Elephants are serious about self-care. To stay cool, and protect their skin, they wallow in mud, bathe in dust and use their trunks to spray themselves with water.
Now, an Asian elephant named Mary, who lives at Berlin Zoo, has developed a more advanced technique, using a large hose to give herself a shower.
Mary’s hose-wielding appears to be the latest example of tool use by animals, say researchers in a paper published on Friday in the journal Current Biology.
“Mary is so superb at showering,” said Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin and an author of the paper.
Mary wasn’t the only elephant who proved handy with a hose. A youngster named Anchali developed two different techniques for interrupting the flow of water through the hose – and, thus, Mary’s showers.
The observation raises a provocative possibility: by disabling the tool Mary was using, Brecht thinks, Anchali was engaged in a “kind of a sabotage behaviour”.
Efforts to test this idea were inconclusive, and researchers disagree over how likely it was that one elephant was effectively pranking another. But the study provides the latest evidence that elephants can use tools and manipulate objects in sophisticated ways. Earlier studies have shown them peeling bananas and using tree branches to swat away flies.
While a hose might seem simple to you, for an animal it is “very complex”, said Lena Kaufmann, a doctoral student in Brecht’s lab and an author of the paper. But, she added, an elephant might have “a somewhat intuitive understanding for a hose, because it’s super similar to the trunk”.
Kaufmann initially noticed Mary’s showering skills while watching zookeepers make their morning rounds, using a hose to rinse off each elephant.
When they got to Mary, they simply handed her the hose.
“And she started showering herself,” Kaufmann said. “She really went for all of the body parts.” Mary’s caretakers told Kaufmann they had not taught her this behaviour.
Mary (left) and Anchali, who grabbed the hose during Mary’s wash. Credit: Urban et al., Current Biology 2024 via The New York Times
But Mary was the only elephant at the zoo who showered with the hose on her own, they found.
She also used different showering techniques. To spray her side, she gripped the hose close to its end, using it like a portable shower head that she directed at different parts of her body. (She also co-ordinated the movements of the hose and her body, swinging a back leg forward as she aimed the hose at it.) To rinse off her back, she held the hose farther from the end and swung it, like a lasso, behind her head.
Mary also altered her showering behaviour depending on which hose was at her disposal. When she had the zoo’s normal hose, which was about 2.5 centimetres in diameter, she showered almost exclusively with it. But when presented with a thicker, stiffer hose that was difficult to manipulate, Mary relied more on her trunk. For the purpose of showering, Kaufmann said, Mary seemed to understand that the bigger, heavier hose was “just not as useful”.
At first, researchers focused mostly on Mary. But one day, while Mary was showering, Anchali grabbed the middle of the hose, lifted it off the ground and folded it to form a kink. Then, Anchali changed her grip and squeezed the kink, stopping the water flow.
It was a complicated manoeuvre, and Anchali got better at it over time, stopping the flow of water for increasingly long periods of time. What the behaviour meant, however, was “debated quite a bit in the lab”, Brecht said.
To stay cool, and protect their skin, elephants wallow in mud, bathe in dust and use their trunks to spray themselves with water.Credit: Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP
Anchali’s behaviour emerged shortly after Mary had begun behaving aggressively towards the youngster. Could the hose kinking be payback?
The scientists tried to test that hypothesis by giving Anchali access to two hoses, theorising that she might prefer to kink the hose that Mary was using, rather than selecting hoses at random. Instead, Anchali tended to clamp whatever hose was closer.
Still, researchers were reluctant to draw definitive conclusions, noting that they had conducted a small number of trials, and that caretakers had previously scolded Anchali for grabbing Mary’s hose.
For Brecht, what made the sabotage hypothesis more convincing was that Anchali also developed a second technique for messing with Mary, using her trunk to press down on the hose until the water stopped flowing. “If she invents two behaviours, and they’re all very complicated and very purposeful,” Brecht said, “my thinking is, it’s the best explanation that she was trying to sabotage the showering.”
Kaufmann is less convinced. “I think it’s a bit far-fetched,” she said.
The hose manipulation might simply have been playful exploration, or a bid for attention while researchers were focused on Mary, with shower stoppages emerging as an accidental byproduct.
But the idea of deliberate interference was worth further investigation, Kaufmann said. “The behaviours she’s performing are leading to the stop of the water flow,” she said. “I cannot tell if that’s her plan.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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