Elephants boast a level of intelligence that makes them some of the sharpest thinkers in the animal kingdom. They have incredible memory, complex social lives, and the ability to peel bananas.
Now, scientists have added another skill to the list. These brainy, brilliant creatures can use hoses to clean themselves and play pranks on each other.
Researchers noticed a 54-year-old Asian elephant named Mary at the Berlin Zoo using her trunk to manipulate a hose in various ways for different purposes.
They were surprised to see her showering herself with water. She even used a lasso-like motion to make the water reach her back. Additionally, she adjusted her grip on the hose and raised one of her back legs to spray it down.
The research team then gave Mary hoses of different sizes to see how she would react. She seemed to favor the zoo’s standard-sized hose. The smaller and larger hoses were likely more difficult to grab and maneuver.
“Mary is the queen of showering,” said Michael Brecht, a co-author of the study and a computational neuroscientist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Another Asian elephant, 12-year-old Anchali, demonstrated an understanding of how to use the hose to pull pranks. When Mary was showering herself, Anchali would often squeeze or stand on the hose to interrupt the flow of water.
Anchali may have been intentionally trying to spoil Mary’s shower time. The younger elephant also developed a new behavior, which has been referred to as a trunk stand. It involves leaning into her trunk to flatten the hose.
She may have just been playing harmless tricks, but it’s possible that her actions were spiteful because Mary was aggressive toward Anchali on occasion.
_KUBE_ – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person or elephant – pictured above a woman gives an elephant a bath with a hose
“It’s something we would really like to know—does she think it’s funny?” Brecht said. “I think it’s very funny, but we really don’t know. Maybe she’s just trying to be mean.”
When handling the hoses, the Asian elephants showered one side of their bodies more frequently than the other, which could have something to do with their trunkedness (whether they were right-trunked or left-trunked).
Mary is left-trunked and spent more time showering her left side than her right. The researchers think Mary might have an intuitive understanding of how to use a hose because of its similarity to the elephant trunk.
Her behavior is just another example of animals using tools. The hose is considered a complex tool because of its length and flexibility, as well as the skill that is needed to control the direction of the water flow.
Other animals that can use tools include crows, cockatoos, macaques, and dolphins. For instance, bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, carry sea sponges in their beaks to dredge up sand on the sea floor and uncover prey.
The details of the study were published in Current Biology.
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