Oops! Turns out that for all my resolutions that I would always find the time for at least one post per month, as soon as my PhD started I suddenly stopped...
So time for an update. The first few months have been really good fun, and despite the warnings that everyone hates their study species within a few months of starting their PhD, I can confirm that elephants are still amazing! It will take a little more than some severe annoyance with R software and many hours writing various applications for extra funding to change my opinion on my pachyderm pals. ❤️
I realise that I've never described what my PhD is all about. The answer is not the same as it was when I last wrote here. They say that no one finishes the PhD project that they start, but I don't think many people have quite such a rapid and dramatic change as mine. Two months after I started, I received the data that I planned to use and discovered that the original plan would not be possible, and I had to entirely overhaul and restart all my planning. But I'll get to that...
The project I originally applied for was based around the development of crop-raiding behaviour in male elephants, and the social interactions through which they learn to approach farms. Crop-raiding is a severe issue in rural areas where elephants and people live close together. Crops offer elephants a more nutritious food source than natural vegetation, allowing them to spend less time foraging to obtain the same nutrition. Elephants are able to eat just about everything they can see in wildlife areas. (Can you imagine that? It would be like being in the supermarket all the time, only where everything is free and you just eat it! Awesome!) Despite this, many have learned to target crops instead. An elephant's digestive system is highly inefficient requiring them to eat for up to 18 hours a day, so improved nutritional content can help to maximise the time they can spend on other activities such as bathing, socialising or playing.
Socialising is key to an elephant's life. As social learners, elephants develop their skills through copying others in the group: first their mothers and female relatives before independence, and then older males once they leave the family unit. This is the basis of my PhD. Originally I was due to be looking into the roles of male copying behaviour and the structure of bull society on the development of crop-raiding behaviour. Some great research has already been done on this (links at the bottom if you're interested), which we were hoping to extend. We still are but in a different way now, as this is where it went wrong. In order to develop a social network, we need to have sufficient data on many individuals to know who they spend the most time with. The population that this study is based around turned out to have many elephants that are each only observed once or twice before they leave again. Imagine someone was trying to work out who you spend time with based on just a single observation: they would likely get a very different idea of your social interactions depending on whether they happened to see you when at home, at work, at the pub, or at the shops. Similarly, we can't build a reliable picture of the elephants' behaviour from such sparse data. In addition, the specific identity of which individuals were raiding crops were even less well characterised. We therefore simply didn't have the data, or the time and money required to collect said data, necessary to carry out the original project plan. Time for a rethink. I can't go into any details of what exactly I'll be up to over the next 3.5 years yet, as currently I'm still waiting on obtaining the necessary permits required to allow my data collection, but essentially I'm going to be exploring more of the social side of the lives of adult male elephants. I will still be based in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana (stunning place, with some of the largest elephants I'd ever seen the one time I went there! Can't wait to go back!), but rather than focussing on crop raiding, we will be looking into the importance of older males in bull society (again, see the links at the bottom for some previous research). More on that once I have the permits -- watch this space!
Sure I've posted this picture before, but it's by far the best I've got of socialising elephants in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park!
- Allen et al. 2021 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70682-y
- Chiyo, Moss and Alberts, 2012 - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0031382
- Goldenberg et al. 2014 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347214002681?casa_token=yK1tXzDKcekAAAAA:KY6lrjZS84nJ49HhF0pNPMZboUVX-IRUUWC44111z7BLKkugfpwMdSHzTk_9RqbdTTjxl1Rf
- Murphy et al. 2020 - https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/31/1/21/5574731?login=true
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