HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW ELEPHANTS?

Are you aware that, like young humans, adult elephants do require mentoring from a father figure as they get older? In this way, humans and elephants are similar. Another resemblance is that we have witnessed elephants burying their deceased. The fact that elephants are not just clever but also self-aware adds to the tragedy of elephant poaching, but the similarities don't stop there.

Just like in the human world elephants can sometimes have problems with their young juvenile male elephants as they go through a period in their lives when they have the potential to become overly hormonal. If juvenile elephants are together in a herd without an older dominant male they will enter a period known as MUST. During MUST, testosterone production ramps up considerably and elephants become highly aggressive.

Some years ago young male elephants who had survived a call were introduced to a new herd that had no older males; these teen elephants all entered this hormonal phase at the same time. Their aggression spiked as their hormones raged and several rhinos died because the male elephants would attack them completely unprovoked. So next time you witness the male subset of a herd of elephants being excessively aggressive, it may as well be the arousal of MUST in them which also indicates the absence of an older elephant among them who could serve as a tame.

Normally it would be years before the males entered this phase usually in their 20s, this may be triggered faster, but as long as a mature male is present the hormones of the younger males will not kick in even though the presence of the female may arouse it to ignite earlier. They have a chance to mature safely, slowly, and in time with the rest of their species.

In so many words, having a responsible father figure prevents young male elephants from acting irresponsibly. Elephants can hear clouds, and elephants have the largest ears in the world. A similarity some humans share with them too. They can hear things that are far away much further than any human can, but so are lots of animals. Elephants however can hear clouds, thanks to their ability to hear incredible low frequencies.

The accuracy of an elephant's ear extends beyond hearing at a distance, they can hear well beyond the range of a human ear when a storm is approaching the clouds produce what is known as infrasound, something that is far beyond the range of what even the most big eared human can hear. Elephants can hear these sounds and can tell when a storm is approaching well before it's obvious to most other animals. Research has suggested that elephants can just know that a rainstorm is as much as 150 miles away.

Elephants can recognize human languages. Besides hearing distant storms, elephants have also developed an ear for human speech on one hand, this may not sound remarkable because many animals can somewhat understand humans such as when your dog responds to commands and recognizes its name but that's not exactly how it works with elephants. Elephants have showed an uncanny ability to differentiate between distinct human languages and also whether or not a speaker is an adult or a child male or female.

Researchers played recordings of the same phrases for Elephants. Elephants were observed not to react at all when played recording of women and children speaking in a certain language because they have learned that it's the men who spoke the language who are the most likely to show aggression not women children or speakers of different languages.