All-Male Groups in Asian Elephants: A Novel, Adaptive Social Strategy in Increasingly Anthropogenic Landscapes of Southern India

Male Asian elephants are known to adopt a high-risk high-gain foraging strategy by venturing into agricultural areas and feeding on nutritious crops in order to improve their reproductive fitness. We hypothesised that the high risks to survival posed by increasingly urbanising and often unpredictabl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2019-07, Vol.9 (1), p.8678-11, Article 8678
Main Authors: Srinivasaiah, Nishant, Kumar, Vinod, Vaidyanathan, Srinivas, Sukumar, Raman, Sinha, Anindya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/158/672
631/158/856
Animals
Anthropogenic factors
Behavior, Animal
Body Size
Conservation of Natural Resources
Ecosystem
Elephants
Female
Foraging behavior
Humanities and Social Sciences
India
Life history
Male
multidisciplinary
Reproductive fitness
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Sex Factors
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Summary:Male Asian elephants are known to adopt a high-risk high-gain foraging strategy by venturing into agricultural areas and feeding on nutritious crops in order to improve their reproductive fitness. We hypothesised that the high risks to survival posed by increasingly urbanising and often unpredictable production landscapes may necessitate the emergence of behavioural strategies that allow male elephants to persist in such landscapes. Using 1445 photographic records of 248 uniquely identified male Asian elephants over a 23-month period, we show that male Asian elephants display striking emergent behaviour, particularly the formation of stable, long-term all-male groups, typically in non-forested or human-modified and highly fragmented areas. They remained solitary or associated in mixed-sex groups, however, within forested habitats. These novel, large all-male associations, may constitute a unique life history strategy for male elephants in the high-risk but resource-rich production landscapes of southern India. This may be especially true for the adolescent males, which seemed to effectively improve their body condition by increasingly exploiting anthropogenic resources when in all-male groups. This observation further supports our hypothesis that such emergent behaviours are likely to constitute an adaptive strategy for male Asian elephants that may be forced to increasingly confront anthropogenically intrusive environments.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-019-45130-1