- Look at this, it is an African elephant
in a South African reserve,
and he's known as a bit of a troublemaker.
This is an electric fence that he wants to break down,
but he has to test it with his tusks
to figure out where it's electrified.
Otherwise, he might get a bit of a shock
which would be quite uncomfortable.
Smart, right?
- That is so smart!
Not only would this elephant have to know which parts
of the fence are electrified, right?
He'd also have to know how to test
that without hurting himself.
So he's using his tusk.
Wow! That is super cool.
- I know, right?
- Elephants are super intelligent though, right?
I mean, this isn't that big of a surprise.
How intelligent are they really?
- Elephants have been reported to cooperate with each other,
experience empathy, and have a working memory
as good as humans, maybe even better.
(bouncy music)
- Welcome to Animal IQ.
In each episode, we measure the intelligence
of a different animal based on a rubric of five domains.
- Each domain can be affected by evolution,
genetics, and the environment.
While directly comparing intelligence
among animals is difficult, this rubric gives us an idea
of where science thinks an animal might fall as of now.
- To build our rubric, we read the research,
talk to experts, and add a trunk-load of elephant
experience. You get it?
You see where I'm going there?
I am super excited for today's animal.
You probably got it. Elephants!
Pop culture says the pachyderm never forgets,
and that they're super smart,
and that their giant brains are a huge advantage.
- Their brains certainly are huge,
and here's what we know.
Elephants have the largest brain of all terrestrial mammals,
and there's have the largest cerebral cortex
by volume in the Animal Kingdom.
The elephant brain has almost as many cortical neurons
as the human brain, and in fact,
some of the neurons are larger than humans
and most other species.
They're encephalization quotient, or EQ, is 1.3,
and remember humans are 7.5.
- They also have great working memory,
which is comparable to humans like you said, Natalia.
And we've even seen them learn to cooperate
with each other in complex problem solving tasks,
which we'll come back to.
Their social scores must be off the charts, right?
- Cooperation will definitely up their social points.
Elephants are not only able to cooperate, but they're aware
for the need of a partner in cooperative tasks.
Scientists have given elephants a task that requires them
to work together to get a food reward.
If they don't work together,
and if they're not aware of that need for a partner,
then they're not going to be able to get that tasty snack.
So they get a bump in the social category,
and elephants should also get a bump
in the awareness category because
of something called the mirror test.
- The mirror test is where they would
put like a piece of tape on the elephant's face,
and then show them themselves in a mirror.
Obviously you and I pass that test really easily,
but not all animals do.
In this case, the elephants would touch the tape
on their face.
They knew they were looking at themselves.
That's amazing, and definitely gets them a bump
in awareness.
Elephants can look into a mirror
and they know what they're looking at.
They essentially know they're looking at themselves.
They can also show empathy,
and there are only a handful of species that have
(yawning) contagious yawning behavior.
Sorry about that.
Let's go back to empathy.
Observations show that elephants,
like humans, can empathize with others.
Not only do they render assistance
when other animals or other elephants are in need,
they can also tell when other elephants are distressed
or, unfortunately, deceased,
and they will act accordingly.
They'll empathize with them.
Research by Ian Douglas Hamilton of Save The Elephants
shows that elephants are concerned with other distressed
or deceased individuals, they'll render assistance,
and as you can see, this elephant family,
they're looking out for their ailing matriarch
It's incredible!
- Empathy is a fairly advanced social trait.
It requires an individual to be able to walk
in another individual's shoes, or, in this case,
deal with another's trunk.
Studies have found that elephants
will form coalitions to protect and comfort each other,
they'll babysit young elephants,
they'll help remove things that are stuck
to other elephants, they'll even help elephants
move that might not be able to move on their own.
Amazing, right?
- It's as if those elephants knew to treat other
elephants the way they would want to be treated.
- Right? It's amazing!
- All that said though,
there is no way that we can know 100%
if elephants experience empathy,
but they sure do appear to.
- Good reminder. Research shows that
elephants have working memory similar to humans,
their eyesight's relatively poor,
but their sense of smell and hearing are excellent.
They can hear family members calling from
far away and remember individual vocalizations
of at least 100 group members.
The old phrase, "Elephants never forget"
is just half of it.
What they really never forget is a smell.
They use their sense of smell to find food,
find safe paths, nearby waterholes, rivers,
or even incoming weather patterns, and nearby humans.
They even use smell to differentiate
between dangerous and non-threatening humans.
- It sounds like they should have
a really high measure of ecological and rational scores.
African elephants can hold information
about several smells in their heads.
They can recognize individual human scents,
classify those humans into different categories,
they can even remember then those classifications
that they made up, which means that in effect,
elephants can categorize things
into classes and subclasses,
which suggests a superhuman-like
memory organization, which I have to say is very cool.
- Remember the fence?
Elephants seem to understand how to manipulate objects.
They've been observed using tools
for personal grooming and if given a bushy limb,
they'll break off a piece for their own personal use.
So elephants seem pretty smart based on studies,
but what about in person?
We call Dr. Joshua Plotnik to get some answers.
Hi, it's good to see you again!
- Yeah, Natalia, it's great to see you as well.
I wish we could do this in person,
but it's exciting to be able to talk to you
about elephants virtually.
I study elephant behavior and cognition
because I am fascinated by how intelligence evolves across
different animal species.
One study we did recently was looking at how
they could tell the difference between different quantities
of food using only their sense of smell.
We looked at two different quantities of sunflower seeds.
And if I were to show you two buckets of sunflower seeds,
one had 30 and one had 180,
I'm pretty sure you could tell the difference, right?
'Cause the 180 is gonna be bigger in the bucket
and so you can see that difference.
But if I showed you 150 and 180, right?
The difference is gonna be so minute,
you're not gonna even be able to tell
if you looked at the side of the bucket,
but the elephants can.
Learning is one of these kind of ubiquitous behaviors,
right? In the Animal Kingdom.
Animals learn on their own by observing.
And as you can imagine, because elephants are such a social
animal, a lot of what they know,
as they get older, is through learning
by observing others and this is how elephants
gain knowledge. Over time, they move from one landscape
to the next, they experience potential predators,
they experience good watering holes versus bad watering
holes, good locations for food versus bad locations
for food. All of this comes through the, you know,
the type of learning that we all experience.
- Tell us a little bit more about how you're digging
into the elephant brain at the moment.
- It's like playing a game, you know?
You give the animal an opportunity to interact
with a puzzle, or a game, or some sort of task,
and you see how they respond to it and can they
change their behavior based on different parameters?
We install puzzle boxes in the field,
which are these big metal boxes that an elephant
can't destroy, although you'd be surprised.
The elephants will manipulate the boxes
in different ways to get access to the food inside.
Some elephants might solve it really quickly.
Some might use a lot of different motor activities,
meaning some might use the tip of their trunk,
or the side of their trunk,
or their full body to try to manipulate it.
I don't know how an elephant sees, hears,
or smells their world,
so all we can do is to kind of come up with experimental
designs and these quote unquote games to try to get
inside the animal's head by taking their perspective.
And in this case it's their sensory perspective.
- What we don't know is if elephants can reason
and understand causality.
In one study, elephants are trained
to touch a bucket lid to reveal a food reward.
Even if the bucket is uncovered,
and the elephants can reach for the food,
they still touch the lid first.
It's almost as if they didn't understand
the causality of needing to remove the lid.
- Famed psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1960s said
that "Intelligence is not just knowing things, but building
on what we know"
And animals have different interests than humans.
So they value different things and thus,
they build in different ways.
They may not see the world the way that we do,
both literally with different eyes and different brains,
but also figuratively.
And thus, they may not build a world of knowledge
in that same way. But getting inside the mind
of an elephant as best that we can,
could actually help us better conserve them.
- We're studying a population of approximately 250 to 300,
and these elephants live within a protected area.
And so the elephants will leave the protected area,
they find this really tasty food
along the periphery of the sanctuary,
and the elephants will go into the crop fields and they'll
eat these crops. And you can imagine this upsets
the farmers. If an elephant is intelligent as we say
that they are, they're gonna come up with ways to deal
with the mitigation strategies that the farmers
have come up with.
So for instance, the farmers will put up fences
and the elephants will knock them down.
Or the farmers will sit in watch towers to protect
their crops, and so they might make loud noises
at night by, you know, banging pots and pans together,
or shooting firecrackers up in the air,
and the elephants are smart and they learn to adapt
to the fact that while this is an annoying noise,
the farmers don't intend to hurt the elephants,
and so the elephants will just wait them out.
What we hope to do is to kind of create a personality
profile for elephants. And why this would be important
is if you wanna try to help elephants in the wild,
you need to understand why some elephants are more
or less likely to engage in this conflict with people.
All of these different studies of behavior and cognition
could help inform conservation by balancing the needs
of the humans with the needs of the animals.
And this is crucially important if we wanna be able
to conserve what's left of our natural world,
and these amazing endangered species.
- That link between elephant cognition and elephant
conservation is such a powerful one.
Let's include that in the X factor.
- Yeah, I think we should put it in the X-Factor
category for sure.
- Okay. So here's how elephants have done our rubric.
They are really so intelligent.
We didn't even have time to cover everything
we know they're capable of.
- These animals are obviously one
of our best performers on our rubric.
But while researching this episode,
I was reading about an African elephants EQ,
remember we mentioned it earlier,
and it's high, but I was surprised to find out
it's actually lower than Asian elephants,
which I think is pretty interesting. We might have
to go back and hit pachyderms up again someday.
- Exactly. We barely scratched the surface
of these impressive pachyderms, this sizeable intellect.
We've covered how they can work together to cooperate,
that they've shown evidence of empathy,
they're truly amazing creatures,
but there's so much left to learn.
So what do you all think?
What animal should we do next?
And are you team African or Asian elephant?
Or do you just love elephants in general?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for watching Animal IQ and see you next time.
(gentle instrumental music)