Do only human beings suffer from stress disorder? A recent study has revealed that elephants exposed to poaching and habitat loss suffer from certain psychological disorders.
In fact, the social structure of the elephants primarily depends on the knowledge flow passed on from one generation to the other. Proper knowledge transfer is required to make these species detect social threats and has an impact over their social behavior as well. The study establishes how culling can adversely affect long term learning and the overall social behavior among elephants.
"Human-generated social disruption has profound effects on important decision-making abilities in wild African elephants that are likely to impact key aspects of their social behavior," said Graeme Shannon, psychologist at Sussex University, England, reports NationalGeographic.
The study was led by the behavioral ecologists at Sussex University who formed an international team to keep a watch over two groups of elephants. The first herd was the resident of Amboseli National Park in Kenya, relatively less exposed to human disruption. The other group living in Pilanesberg Park in South Africa was mostly of orphaned calves, victim of ongoing animal poaching. Both the groups were made to listen to elephant vocalizations using a series of acoustic playbacks.
The survey was conducted in two halves. In the first half, both the groups were exposed to familiar and unfamiliar elephant calls to see how they reacted to social threats. In the second half, the calls were slightly different in the sense they belonged to elephants from different age groups. The Amboseli herd of elephants were better able to distinguish threatening and unfamiliar calls and accordingly responded. The group was also found to be more skilled in identifying foreign calls from different age groups. On the other the Pilansberg elephants were disoriented and failed to recognize the differences between the calls from dissimilar age groups.
According to the researchers, the Pilansberg elephants, who were victims of human disruptions, 'experienced terrible trauma' and were unable to develop good decision making powers as there was a lack of passing on of social knowledge from elderly family members who had been killed before their eyes.
Human disruption has encroached to such an extent, that it's not only leading to depletion of the wild species but might pose a greater risk of unseen social problems. "The dramatic increase in human disturbance is not just a numbers game but can have profound impacts on the viability and functioning of disrupted populations at a deeper level," said Shannon, reports Huffington Post.
