Publication Date:
2001-04-21
Description:
Despite widespread interest in the evolution of social intelligence, little is known about how wild animals acquire and store information about social companions or whether individuals possessing enhanced social knowledge derive biological fitness benefits. Using playback experiments on African elephants (Loxodonta africana), we demonstrated that the possession of enhanced discriminatory abilities by the oldest individual in a group can influence the social knowledge of the group as a whole. These superior abilities for social discrimination may result in higher per capita reproductive success for female groups led by older individuals. Our findings imply that the removal of older, more experienced individuals, which are often targets for hunters because of their large size, could have serious consequences for endangered populations of advanced social mammals such as elephants and whales.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉McComb, K -- Moss, C -- Durant, S M -- Baker, L -- Sayialel, S -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2001 Apr 20;292(5516):491-4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Experimental Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK. karenm@biols.susx.ac.uk〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11313492" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Aging
;
Animals
;
*Behavior, Animal
;
Biological Evolution
;
Conservation of Natural Resources
;
*Discrimination (Psychology)
;
*Elephants/physiology
;
Exploratory Behavior
;
Female
;
Kenya
;
Reproduction
;
Social Behavior
;
*Vocalization, Animal
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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