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American scientists have found that elephants who have lost their mothers are experiencing great stress. However, those animals that receive support from members of the herd more easily endure the loss, as shown by blood tests of elephants for the "stress hormone".
As the author of the study , Jenna Parker, an ecologist at Colorado State University, noted, his goal was to analyze the physical impact of mother loss on elephants over a long period of time.
The data obtained indicate that for these smart and very social animals, support from relatives is extremely important. Good communication reduces stress in orphans, she noted.
Parker said that while observing elephants in their natural environment, she noticed that they value family ties and are attached to their mother until they are 8-9 years old. At the same time, they can call each other if they lose someone out of sight, the children try to be as close as possible to the mother and vice versa.
They need to constantly know where their relatives are, the specialist said.
The ecologist said that the study was based on data on the behavior and condition of elephants from the Kenyan reserve, in which many of these animals were killed by poachers. Then a large number of young elephants were left without mothers. They experienced aggression from foreign adults.
I wanted to understand what was happening to them physically. We took their feces for analysis. We followed the elephants for about a year. We were able to study 25 orphaned African elephants, all of whom lost their mothers between one and 19 years ago. We also studied 12 non-orphaned elephants of the same age. It turned out that in animals that had more companions of the same age in the group, the level of the stress hormone was significantly lower than in others, the scientist said.
She also noted that over time, the elephants experienced less stress, which means that they received support in their society.
The scientist pointed out that people are also subject to stress when left alone in this world, especially at an early age. And also a lot depends on how much support from relatives and friends they will receive at this time. The more powerful and faster it is, the less the body is subject to stress, which means that it will not have an effect on a person in the long term.
