Page 21 - Dainfern Precinct Living Issue 1 2025

THE BIG PICTURE
NATURE

Elephants have been around in here are so many other facets of the
elephant’s nature that can be described as
their present interesting shape
ELEPHANTS for more or less 20 million years. T their mothers for the first 10 years and all in
being ‘just like us’, that it is quite uncanny
- their family loyalty for a start, and their
respect for social order. Calves stay close to
ARE JUST LIKE US They have adapted to living in the herd respect, with unswerving loyalty, the herd leader
who is always an elderly female.
deserts, in canopy jungle, in
The matriarch forces out the males when they become
mature. They will roam alone or with a male ‘askari’ forever,
savannahs and in mountains –
seeking receptive females. Isn’t that reminiscent of some
just like us. human cultures?
There’s a term for shared behavioural similarities –
‘convergent evolution’. It describes how circumstances over
thousands of generations can cause quite unrelated species
to become similar in their way of life, their reactions and even
their shape. Look at how the beautiful streamlining of sharks,
which are fish, so closely resemble the streamlining and fins
of dolphins, which are mammals. Each evolved separately
but their adaptations converged - the shark evolved from a
primitive fish more than 400 million years ago; the dolphin
evolved from a four-legged, semi-aquatic land creature
50 million years ago.

The recent surge of interest in the character and behaviour
of Africa’s wild elephants owes a lot to the latter-day influx of
women into the science of animal behaviour (ethology). The
recent discoveries by female ethologists have often been
startling, even to scientists who are not easily startled.
Perhaps it’s because women scientists are not
quite as nervous as their male counterparts about
anthropomorphising – that is attributing human behaviour
to animals. Jane Goodall upset her Cambridge mentors
by giving names to her wild chimpanzee study group in
Tanzania’s Gombe forest - remember the big male chimp,
David Greybeard? She had been told to assign them only
numbers.

And, I suggest, women are more empathetic by nature and
so they are more able to tune into and intuitively understand
animal behaviour, especially when it comes to mothers and
families.
Two generations of dedicated and intrepid women field-
biologists like Goodall, have been responsible for a
watershed in the pace and direction of research. They
popularised behavioural research without affecting the
dignity of science.

It began with Goodall, who came from London to Africa in
the late 1950s as a secretary to Louis Leakey the Kenyan
anthropologist. He recognised her unusual ability to observe
wild animal behaviour with intelligence and analytical skill –
she was a born ethologist. In 1971, a decade after becoming
a scientist, she wrote her bestseller, In the Shadow of Man.
It gave the world its first glimpse into the private lives of an
animal few people had known outside zoos. Then it was
Dian Fossey, another Cambridge PhD who lived with and
wrote about mountain gorillas and paid for it with her life -
murdered by a poacher.
In the 1980s, Cornell PhD, Katy Payne, discovered how wild
elephants kept in touch with each other via aerial vibrations
even when out of sight. Then came Joyce Poole, another
Cambridge PhD who made even more inroads into the private
lives of elephants.
An observation by an American expert on insects, Caitlin
O’Connoll, a PhD from Hawaii, who just happened to be
visiting Africa, astonished everybody. She was watching a
passing herd of elephants and noticed one stop dead in mid
stride “as if it had heard something”. She could sense it was

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