Elephant turns a hose into a sophisticated showering tool

“Elephants are amazing with hoses,” says Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin, one of the senior authors. “As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.”

The researchers made the discovery after the paper’s other senior author Lena Kaufmann, also of Humbolt University of Berlin, witnessed the Asian elephant Mary at the Berlin Zoo showering one day and captured it on film. She took it back to her colleagues who were immediately impressed. First study author Lea Urban decided to analyze the behavior in more detail.

“I had not thought about hoses as tools much before, but what came out from Lea’s work is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools,” Brecht says.

The researchers found that Mary systematically showers her body, coordinating the water hose with her limbs. She usually grasps the hose behind its tip to use it as a stiff shower head. To reach her back, she switches to a lasso strategy, grasping the hose farther up and swinging it over her body. When presented with a larger and heavier hose, Mary used her trunk to wash instead of the bulkier and less useful hose.

The researchers say that the findings offer a new example of goal-directed tool use. But what surprised them most was the way fellow Asian elephant Anchali reacted during Mary’s showering.

The two elephants showed aggressive interactions around showering time, the researchers say. At one point, Anchali started pulling the hose toward herself and away from Mary, lifting and kinking it to disrupt water flow. While they can’t be sure of Anchali’s intentions, it looked a lot like the elephant was displaying a kind of second order tool use behavior, disabling a tool in more conventional use by a fellow elephant, perhaps as an act of sabotage.

“The surprise was certainly Anchali’s kink-and-clamp behavior,” Brecht says. “Nobody had thought that she’d be smart enough to pull off such a trick.”

In fact, he reports plenty of debate in the lab about Anchali’s behavior and what it meant. Then, they saw Anchali find another way to disrupt Mary’s shower. In this case, Anchali did what the researchers refer to as a trunkstand to stop the water flow. For this feat, Anchali places her trunk on the hose and then lowers her massive body onto it.

Brecht explains that the elephants are well trained not to step on hoses, lest the keepers scold them. As a result, he says, they almost never do that. The researchers suspect that’s why Anchali has come up with more challenging workarounds to stop the water from flowing during Mary’s showers.

“When Anchali came up with a second behavior that disrupted water flow to Mary, I became pretty convinced that she is trying to sabotage Mary,” Brecht said.

The findings come as a reminder of elephants’ extraordinary manipulative skill and tool use, made possible by the grasping ability of their trunks. The researchers say they now wonder what the findings in zoo elephants mean for elephants in their natural environments.

“Do elephants play tricks on each other in the wild?” Brecht asked. “When I saw Anchali’s kink and clamp for the first time, I broke out in laughter. So, I wonder, does Anchali also think this is funny, or is she just being mean?”

This research was funded by the European Research Council.

Video in journal article: