Thanks to a few dozen YouTube videos, scientists finally have the rare data they need to analyze grieflike displays in Asian elephants.
a beleaguered Asian elephant trying to nudge the limp body of her dead calf back to life. As her ears fluttered in distress, she used her trunk and feet to jostle the lifeless carcass for more than 24 hours. Eventually, 12 more adults gathered around the deceased calf, as if to comfort the mother.
Conservation biologist Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel had only observed one instance of an elephant responding to another’s death, after 4 years of fieldwork in India. Even colleagues who had spent decades studying Asian elephants in the bush had seen these “thanatological behaviors” only a handful of times. So Pokharel and her team at the Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Ecological Sciences turned to YouTube.
Some of the videos also captured rarer behaviors, never before described in detail. In multiple clips, adult elephants use their trunks to pat their still-living friends on their heads; in another, a calf snuggles up to its dying mother, who had become ensnared in viscous mud. In five videos, adult female elephants scooped up deceased calves with their trunks and carried them through the forests for days, possibly weeks, at a time.
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