Elephant behavior and social life

Family groups and the matriarch

The core unit of elephant society is the family: related adult females, their daughters and their young sons. In African elephants the family is led by a matriarch, usually the oldest female. She decides when the group moves, remembers where to find food and water in hard times, and leads the response to threats. When families grow large they may split, but the splinter groups, sometimes called bond groups, stay loosely associated and greet each other enthusiastically when they meet.

The matriarch's age really matters. In Kenya's Amboseli National Park, McComb and colleagues found that families with older matriarchs were better at telling the calls of familiar and unfamiliar elephants apart, and reacted defensively only when it made sense. A later study by the same group found that older matriarchs were also better at judging which lion roars signaled the greatest danger. We look at this research in Do elephants really never forget?

Asian elephant herds are generally smaller. The Smithsonian's National Zoo notes that they do not have a clear matriarch in the African sense, although individual females may take a more dominant role, and that members work together to raise calves and protect the group.

Bulls and musth

Young males leave their birth family as they approach adolescence. The Smithsonian gives an age of 8 to 13 years for Asian elephants, often as a gradual process as the young male becomes more independent and the females less tolerant of his roughness. Young bulls form loose bachelor groups, and older bulls often spend more time alone. Males do not help raise calves.

Adult bulls periodically enter musth, a state of greatly raised testosterone. Bulls in musth are more aggressive and competitive, secrete fluid from the temporal glands on the sides of the head and dribble urine, and are especially attractive to females ready to breed. Older, larger bulls in musth usually outcompete younger ones, so most males do not father calves until well into adulthood; the Smithsonian notes that wild Asian bulls are unlikely to sire calves before their thirties.

Calves and growing up

After a pregnancy of about 22 months (the longest of any animal), a single calf is born, standing about 1 m tall. It can stand soon after birth and nurses with its mouth, since the trunk takes months to master. Other females in the family help guard and guide calves, and the whole group adjusts its pace to the youngest. Calves usually stop nursing at two to three years old, though weaning can last until the next sibling arrives. Females stay with their family for life.

When danger appears, adults bunch together facing outward with the young in the middle, which San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance calls an alert circle. Healthy adult elephants have no natural predators besides people, but calves can be taken by lions, hyenas, crocodiles and, in Asia, tigers.

How elephants communicate

Sound. Elephants trumpet, roar, bark, squeal and, most of all, rumble. Many rumbles include infrasound, frequencies too low for people to hear, which travel far. The Smithsonian's National Zoo says these calls can be understood by other elephants more than 2 miles away, and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance gives up to 5 miles (8 km). Rumbles coordinate group movement, reunite separated family members, warn of predators and, in females ready to breed, attract bulls.

Names. In 2024, Pardo and colleagues reported in Nature Ecology and Evolution that wild African elephants in Kenya address family members with individually specific calls. A machine learning model could predict who a rumble was meant for from its sound, and elephants responded more strongly to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them. Unlike dolphins and parrots, which imitate the call of the animal they address, elephants did not seem to copy the receiver's own voice, which makes these calls more like human names.

Ground vibrations. Low rumbles and foot stamps also travel through the ground. Research by Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell and colleagues, reported by Stanford in 2007, found that wild African elephants responded to seismic playbacks of alarm calls, and responded differently to familiar and unfamiliar callers.

Touch and smell. Elephants touch each other constantly with their trunks to greet, reassure, play and discipline. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance describes a greeting in which a lower ranking elephant puts its trunk tip into the other's mouth. Smell is a powerful channel too: by sniffing an elephant's mouth, temporal gland, urine or dung, another elephant can learn its identity, sex and reproductive state.

Sleep

Elephants are among the shortest sleepers known. Gravett and colleagues fitted two wild African elephant matriarchs in Botswana's Chobe National Park with activity monitors and found they slept about two hours a day on average, the shortest daily sleep time recorded for any mammal at the time. They slept both standing and lying down but lay down only every third or fourth day, and on five occasions went up to 46 hours without sleep. Zoo elephants, which San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance says sometimes snore, often lie down for a few hours at night.

Responses to the dead

Elephants pay unusual attention to the remains of their own kind. In a 2006 experiment in Amboseli, McComb, Baker and Moss found that African elephants showed much more interest in elephant skulls and ivory than in the skulls of other large mammals or in pieces of wood, touching and smelling them with trunk and feet. Researchers have also described elephants returning to and investigating the bodies of dead herd members. Whether this reflects grief as people feel it is unknown, but it is one of the reasons elephants are studied as emotionally complex animals.