Kaufmann initially noticed Mary’s showering skills while watching zookeepers make their morning rounds, using a hose to rinse off each elephant.
When they got to Mary, they simply handed her the hose.
“And she started showering herself,” Kaufmann said. “She really went for all of the body parts.” Mary’s caretakers told Kaufmann they had not taught her this behaviour.
Mary (left) and Anchali, who grabbed the hose during Mary’s wash. Credit: Urban et al., Current Biology 2024 via The New York Times
But Mary was the only elephant at the zoo who showered with the hose on her own, they found.
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She also used different showering techniques. To spray her side, she gripped the hose close to its end, using it like a portable shower head that she directed at different parts of her body. (She also co-ordinated the movements of the hose and her body, swinging a back leg forward as she aimed the hose at it.) To rinse off her back, she held the hose farther from the end and swung it, like a lasso, behind her head.
Mary also altered her showering behaviour depending on which hose was at her disposal. When she had the zoo’s normal hose, which was about 2.5 centimetres in diameter, she showered almost exclusively with it. But when presented with a thicker, stiffer hose that was difficult to manipulate, Mary relied more on her trunk. For the purpose of showering, Kaufmann said, Mary seemed to understand that the bigger, heavier hose was “just not as useful”.
At first, researchers focused mostly on Mary. But one day, while Mary was showering, Anchali grabbed the middle of the hose, lifted it off the ground and folded it to form a kink. Then, Anchali changed her grip and squeezed the kink, stopping the water flow.
It was a complicated manoeuvre, and Anchali got better at it over time, stopping the flow of water for increasingly long periods of time. What the behaviour meant, however, was “debated quite a bit in the lab”, Brecht said.
To stay cool, and protect their skin, elephants wallow in mud, bathe in dust and use their trunks to spray themselves with water.Credit: Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP
Anchali’s behaviour emerged shortly after Mary had begun behaving aggressively towards the youngster. Could the hose kinking be payback?
The scientists tried to test that hypothesis by giving Anchali access to two hoses, theorising that she might prefer to kink the hose that Mary was using, rather than selecting hoses at random. Instead, Anchali tended to clamp whatever hose was closer.
Still, researchers were reluctant to draw definitive conclusions, noting that they had conducted a small number of trials, and that caretakers had previously scolded Anchali for grabbing Mary’s hose.
For Brecht, what made the sabotage hypothesis more convincing was that Anchali also developed a second technique for messing with Mary, using her trunk to press down on the hose until the water stopped flowing. “If she invents two behaviours, and they’re all very complicated and very purposeful,” Brecht said, “my thinking is, it’s the best explanation that she was trying to sabotage the showering.”
Kaufmann is less convinced. “I think it’s a bit far-fetched,” she said.
The hose manipulation might simply have been playful exploration, or a bid for attention while researchers were focused on Mary, with shower stoppages emerging as an accidental byproduct.
But the idea of deliberate interference was worth further investigation, Kaufmann said. “The behaviours she’s performing are leading to the stop of the water flow,” she said. “I cannot tell if that’s her plan.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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