Lucy Anne Bates

University of Portsmouth

Biodiversity conservation strategies may prioritise certain values of nature over others. Whilst there will likely always be a need for compromise in conservation planning, the consequences of trade-offs depend on peoples' relative perceptions of values that are promoted or neglected. In practice, not fully understanding or taking into account the...

Removal from natural habitat and commodification as private property compromise elephants' broader societal value. Although we support Baker & Winkler's (2020) plea for a new community-based rewilding conservation model focused on mahout culture, we recommend an expanded co-management approach to complement and enhance the regional elephant conserv...

Management interventions are necessary to control elephant numbers within fenced wildlife reserves in South Africa. Use of non-lethal control methods is increasing, but information about their suitability and effects are not widely available. Three such methods are currently available: immunocontraception with porcine zona pellucida vaccine, vasect...

With an increase in poaching of elephants Loxodonta africana across Africa, it is vital to know exactly how many elephants remain and where they occur, to ensure that protection and management are planned appropriately. From a nationwide survey we provide current population and distribution data for elephants in South Africa. We consider the viabil...

Elephants are both charismatic and enigmatic, and often the biggest attraction in game reserves and national parks. When we enter their territory, it is important to respect their space and make every effort to understand them and respond to their various behaviours. Understanding Elephants cautions us to be sensitive to their needs, to read the s...

Where a natural phenomenon can be brought under experimental control, either in the laboratory or the field, greater power of analysis is always achieved. But what of the phenomena that (so far) have not proved amenable to experiment? The answer for animal cognition has often been that analysis must

Imitation of actions is widespread in the animal kingdom, but the mental capacities thereby implied vary greatly according to the adaptive function of copying. Behavioral synchrony in social species has many possible benefits, including minimizing predation risk and using food resources optimally, but can be understood by the simple cognitive mecha...

Female mate choices. Analysis showing that nulliparous female elephants do not direct their oestrous behaviour appropriately towards musth males, unlike parous females. (0.02 MB DOC)

Data table to accompany Document S1. (0.03 MB DOC)

Female African elephants signal oestrus via chemicals in their urine, but they also exhibit characteristic changes to their posture, gait and behaviour when sexually receptive. Free-ranging females visually signal receptivity by holding their heads and tails high, walking with an exaggerated gait, and displaying increased tactile behaviour towards...

Primates undoubtedly have impressive abilities in perceiving, recognizing, manipulating, and predicting other individuals, but only great apes seem to recognize the cognitive basis of manipulative and cooperative tactics or the concept of self. None of these abilities is unique to primates. We distinguish (1) a package of quantitative advantages in...

Most social primates live in cohesive groups, so travel paths inevitably reflect compromise: decision processes of individuals are obscured. The fission–fusion social organisation of the chimpanzee, however, allows an individual's movements to be investigated independently. We followed 15 chimpanzees (eight male and seven female) through the relati...

Efficient exploitation of large-scale space is crucial to many species of animal, but the difficulties of studying how animals decide on travel routes in natural environments have hampered scientific understanding of environmental cognition. Field experiments allow researchers to define travel goals for their subjects, but practical difficulties re...

On many of the staple measures of comparative psychology, elephants show no obvious differences from other mammals, such as primates: discrimination learning, memory, spontaneous tool use, etc. However, a range of more naturalistic mea- sures have recently suggested that elephant cognition may be rather different. Wild elephants sub-categorize huma...

Elephants show a rich social organization and display a number of unusual traits. In this paper, we analyse reports collected over a thirty-five year period, describing behaviour that has the potential to reveal signs of empathic understanding. These include coalition formation, the offering of protection and comfort to others, retrieving and ‘baby...

Monitoring the location of conspecifics may be important to social mammals. Here, we use an expectancy-violation paradigm to test the ability of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) to keep track of their social companions from olfactory cues. We presented elephants with samples of earth mixed with urine from female conspecifics that were either...

Animals can benefit from classifying predators or other dangers into categories, tailoring their escape strategies to the type and nature of the risk. Studies of alarm vocalizations have revealed various levels of sophistication in classification. In many taxa, reactions to danger are inflexible, but some species can learn the level of threat prese...

In testing the 'social brain hypothesis' with comparative data, most research has used group size as an index of cognitive challenge. Recent work suggests that this measure is too crude to apply to a wide range of species, and biologists may need to develop other ways of extending these analyses.

Variations in brain size and proportions can be linked to the cognitive capacities of different animal species, and correlations with ecology may give clues to the evolutionary origins of these specializations. Much recent evidence has implicated the social domain as a major challenge driving increases in problem-solving abilities of mammals. Howev...

In non-human animals, creative behaviour occurs spontaneously only at low frequencies, so is typically missed by standardised observational methods. Experimental approaches have tended to rely overly on paradigms from child development or adult human cognition, which may be inappropriate for species that inhabit very different perceptual worlds and...

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Previous research has suggested social learning of foraging behavior can inhibit learning of the optimal behavior pattern. Based on their transmission chain design, we used small groups of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) to determine the degree to which the optimal behavior pattern was inhibited by socially learned information. A founder group was tr...