What Scares Elephants?

[EnolaGaia]

In some parts of the world elephants are dangerous and ruinous pests.

What really scares elephants, and hence might be exploited to deter elephants?

 

[EnolaGaia]

Let's start with the longstanding trope of elephants being frightened of mice.

Are Elephants Really Afraid of Mice?

From the movie "Dumbo" to Saturday morning cartoons, the image of an elephant cowering from a miniscule mouse is pretty well established. But the elephant's fear has more to do with the element of surprise than the mouse itself.

Theories abound that elephants are afraid of mice because the tiny creatures nibble on their feet or can climb up into their trunks. However, there's no evidence to back up either of those claims.

The mouse-in-the-trunk myth, for example, seems to date back centuries to the ancient Greeks, who reportedly told fables about a mouse that climbed into an elephant's trunk and drove it crazy. Some have said the claim started with Pliny the Elder in A.D. 77 ...

Apparently, in the late 1600s, an Irish physician named Allen Moulin was trying to figure out why such big pachyderms might quiver at the sight of such a small rodent as a mouse, according to Christopher Plumb's "The Georgian Menagerie: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century London" (I. B. Tauris, 2015). Moulin reasoned that since elephants had no epiglottis — the flap of cartilage that covers the opening to the windpipe when swallowing — the big creatures could be "worried" that a mouse might crawl up their trunk and suffocate them, Plumb wrote. "This seemed reasonable since the keeper [Moulin] had seen his elephant sleep with his trunk close to the ground, so that only air might go up it," Plumb, who received his doctoral degree from the University of Manchester, wrote in the book. However, as biologists today know, elephants are equipped with that fleshy windpipe cover. ...

It's more likely that elephants, which have relatively poor eyesight, simply become startled when mice dart past. [Why Can't Elephants Jump?]

"In the wild, anything that suddenly runs or slithers by an elephant can spook it," said Josh Plotnik, a researcher of elephant behavior and intelligence at the University of Cambridge in England and the head of elephant research for the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation in Chiang Rai, Thailand, told Live Science. "It doesn't have to be a mouse — dogs, cats, snakes or any animal that makes sudden movements by an elephant's feet can startle it."

John Hutchinson, a researcher at the structure and motion lab of the Royal Veterinary College in London, agreed: "Elephants get a bit nervous sometimes when small, fast animals are around them," he said. "I can remember one occasion when a local dog in Thailand was running around while we were working with an elephant for our locomotor studies. The elephant really did not like the barking, sprinting animal around it, especially when it couldn't see where the dog was. The elephant panicked, running off into the nearby jungle."

ABC's 20/20 conducted a test with trained elephants at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2006. A reporter and the circus elephant's trainer held mice in their hands and showed them to several elephants; apparently the elephants "only looked bored" and "not one of them seemed to care much." That may have been because the mice were held up for the elephants to clearly see in the reporter's and trainer's hands, instead of being set loose to race around the elephants' feet.

So rather than being afraid of the mouse itself, an elephant is most likely just surprised by its quick, frantic movements. "But the same is true for most animals," Plotnik said.

SOURCE: https://www.livescience.com/33261-elephants-afraid-of-mice-.html

 

[EnolaGaia]

Nonetheless ... When Mythbusters decided to test elephants' reactions to mice they found the pachyderms did seem apprehensive. However, the manner in which they surprised the elephants with mice was consistent with surprise - rather than the mice per se - being the factor that disturbed the elephants.

Elephants Are Afraid of Mice

Finding: PLAUSIBLE

Explanation: Way back in A.D. 77, Pliny the Elder started the impressively persistent rumor that "the elephant hates the mouse above all other creatures." For millennia, people have taken the Roman philosopher's word for it, but MythBusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman figured it was just too far-fetched for an enormous mammal to be frightened by a minuscule mouse. Fully expecting to bust Pliny's myth wide open, the MythBusters traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, to set a few mice loose around wild elephants and see what happened.

To slip the mice into elephant territory, Jamie and Adam placed the rodents in mouse-sized holes in the ground and covered them with balls of elephant dung. When a pachyderm approached, they yanked away the dung to reveal the mice.

Much to their surprise, the mice stopped the elephants dead in their tracks. Once the lumbering giants noticed a potential critter confrontation, they backed away and plodded off in the other direction. Thinking it might've been the dung-ball disturbance that explained the nervous reaction, the MythBusters tried to scare the elephants by moving the dung without any mice around. But only the presence of mice could sufficiently startle them.

So, while the rodents didn't incite any stampedes, the elephants' cautious behavior was enough evidence for Jamie and Adam to declare Pliny's proposition plausible.

SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/2015031...rs/mythbusters-database/elephants-afraid-mice

 

[EnolaGaia]

This 2014 BBC Earth article describes multiple ways that have been demonstrated to deter elephants ...

How to scare off the biggest pest in the world

... To avoid confrontations and protect their crops, farmers in Africa and Asia have traditionally used several tricks to scare off elephants, like beating drums, firing gunshots into the air or bursting firecrackers. But elephants are intelligent and persistent, and not easily put off. So people resort to poisoning or shooting the elephants. This is bad for all concerned.

So now researchers are experimenting with new strategies that can detect elephants early, and deter them from raiding people's properties. No guns are involved. ...

One approach uses bees and / or the sound of buzzing bees ...

Beehive fences

African elephants are afraid of bees, especially the aggressive African honey bees. These bees' stings can be extremely painful even for the thick-skinned elephants, especially inside their trunk or around their eyes.

In 2002, researchers found that African elephants stay away from acacia trees with beehives. Later studies showed that not only do the elephants run away from the sound of buzzing bees, they also emit low-frequency alarm calls to alert family members about the possible threat. ...

In 2007, researchers began testing beehive fences as possible elephant deterrents in Kenya. The fence consists of beehives hung every 10 m, linked by wires. When an elephant touches the fence, the beehives swing, unleashing a swarm of angry bees.

Another approach uses the recorded sounds of tigers ...

Tigers on tape

If you don't fancy living with bees, you could scare elephants away using the sound of angry tigers.

In southern India, tigers and elephants often live side by side. While tigers don't usually hunt elephants due to their size, they have been known to kill elephant calves. So elephants are wary of tigers.

In 2010, Vivek Thuppil, then at the University of California-Davis and now at the University of Nottingham, recorded the aggressive growls of a captive tiger and leopard, and played them to elephants frequenting villages around two protected areas in southern India. Whenever the elephants ventured close to crop fields, they tripped an infrared beam, triggering playbacks of the growls.

On hearing the agitated tiger growls, the elephants silently retreated. Thuppil is now developing a low-cost playback system that the farmers can use as elephant deterrents. "We hope to… make commercially available devices a reality by this time next year," he says.

A third strategy uses extremely hot chillis ...

Chilli

Elephants don't like chillis. Capsaicin, the chemical in chillis that makes them hot, is an irritant, causing elephants to cough, sneeze and eventually turn away.

So some farmers in Africa protect their crops from elephants by planting buffers of chilli plants around them. The chillis also earn them extra money. The Elephant Pepper Development Trust in Cape Town, South Africa, teaches farmers to make rope fences smeared with waste engine oil and red chilli, and mounted with cowbells, to deter elephants. ...

Asian farmers are also experimenting with chilli. Farmers in southern India use a combination of dry hay, tobacco, and dry red chili pods and seeds wrapped up in newspapers to create pungent smoke.

In north-east India, conservationists have gone a step further and tried using ghost chillis, or bhut jolokias, one of the hottest chillis in the world.

However, chilli-based methods do not work alone and perform best when combined with other deterrents. "Whatever the technique, it always works better when the farmer is present in his crop field," says Prachi Mehta of the Wildlife Research and Conservation Society in Pune, India. ...

FULL STORY: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141204-five-ways-to-scare-off-elephants

 

[EnolaGaia]

One Indian railway company has decided to use the buzzing bee sounds tactic to keep elephants off their tracks.

Indian railway company using bee sounds to ward off elephants

Officials with an Indian railway company said they have started using the recorded sound of buzzing bees to keep elephants from wandering onto the tracks.

The Northeast Frontier Railway said its Moradabad division installed a "Honey Bee Sound System" in locations known to be frequented by elephants.

Officials said villagers who spot elephants in the area alert the company, and workers then engage the sound system to play the sound of bees, which elephants are known to avoid for fear of being stung.

The company said the system was adopted in response to an increasing number of elephants killed in collisions with trains.

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2020/0...e-sounds-to-ward-off-elephants/5361584473621/

 

[GNC]

Are you currently having trouble with elephants, @EnolaGaia ?

 

[PeteByrdie]

Are you currently having trouble with elephants, @EnolaGaia ?

After a while you just can't ignore the elephant in the room any longer.

 

[PeteByrdie]

I can't imagine anything much scares the biggest land animal. The thread title makes me feel obliged to try to answer this question. Fire, perhaps? Ants crawling all over them? Tight spaces? I bet elephants are claustrophobic.

 

[EnolaGaia]

... Ants crawling all over them? ...

I doubt insects crawling on them (in general) disturbs elephants, but ... That makes me wonder whether there are any swarming insects other than bees that can irritate or hurt them. Fire ants? Termites, perhaps?

 

[XBergMann]

Bigger elephants.

 

[EnolaGaia]

One reason elephant deterrence- and a need to understand elephant psychology - are increasingly important relates to the conflicts between elephants and the people who have to live around them.

This new Smithsonian article describes some of this background and resultant research ...

RESEARCHERS ARE LEARNING HOW ASIAN ELEPHANTS THINK—IN ORDER TO SAVE THEM

As the pachyderms increasingly clash with farmers and villagers over disappearing land, scientists study the way the animals’ minds work

... Today, while the Asian elephant is still listed as an endangered species, its numbers appear to be rising in some regions. By 2011, the elephant population in Sri Lanka was back up to nearly 6,000, according to a census conducted at watering holes. The bigger problem is that the human population has also increased. Sri Lanka, at 25,000 square miles, is about the size of West Virginia, which has fewer than 2 million residents; Sri Lanka has close to 22 million. In other words, elephants in Sri Lanka don’t have much room to wander. Lands they once inhabited have yielded to towns, farms and orchards.

This means humans and elephants are increasingly in conflict. Elephants normally graze in the forest, working hard to fuel their enormous herbivore bodies with grass, bark, roots and leaves. But when they find a field of bananas or sugar cane, they hit pay dirt. Farmers throughout Asia often face heavy financial losses after elephants discover a crop. Sometimes the conflict turns violent. In Sri Lanka, elephants killed around 100 people in 2019. In India, elephant encounters over the past four years have killed more than 1,700 people. ...

It all comes down to this riddle: How can an enormous animal keep thriving on a continent where space is only getting scarcer? The answer might lie in understanding the elephants themselves, not just as a species but as individuals. What makes one elephant raid a crop field while another stays far away? What are the driving forces behind elephant social groupings? How do bold and demure personality types function in a cohort? Scientists are just starting to explore these questions. But our ability to match wits with the largest-brained land animal might be our best hope for helping it survive. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ng-asian-elephants-think-save-them-180974366/

 

[Bad Bungle]

You can scare elephants off with tigers, they don't like them.



And you can scare tigers off with guns (like this curator in Leeds Armoury Museum)

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Nonetheless ... When Mythbusters decided to test elephants' reactions to mice they found the pachyderms did seem apprehensive. However, the manner in which they surprised the elephants with mice was consistent with surprise - rather than the mice per se - being the factor that disturbed the elephants.


SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/2015031...rs/mythbusters-database/elephants-afraid-mice

Nah it's mice, they run up the trunks and eat their brains from the inside.