Joshua M Plotnik’s research while affiliated with City University of New York - Hunter College and other places


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Publications (58)


Do elephants really never forget? What we know about elephant memory and a call for further investigation
  • Article

October 2024

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21 Reads

Learning & Behavior

Sydney F. Hope

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Kaitlyn R. Willgohs

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Sangpa Dittakul

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Joshua M. Plotnik

Despite popular culture’s promotion of the elephant’s ability to “never forget,” there is remarkably limited empirical research on the memory capacities of any living elephant species (Asian, Elephas maximus; African savanna, Loxodonta africana; African forest, Loxodonta cyclotis). A growing body of literature on elephant cognition and behavioral ecology has provided insight into the elephant’s ability to behave flexibly in changing physical and social environments, but little direct evidence of how memory might relate to this flexibility exists. In this paper, we review and discuss the potential relationships between what we know about elephant cognition and behavior and the elephants’ memory for the world around them as they navigate their physical, social, and spatial environments. We also discuss future directions for investigating elephant memory and implications for such research on elephant conservation and human–elephant conflict mitigation.



In memory of our mentor: Frans de Waal (1948-2024)

August 2024

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61 Reads

American Journal of Primatology

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Filippo Aureli

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Kristin Bonnie

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[...]

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The world lost a towering figure when primatologist Frans de Waal passed away on March 14, 2024. Many are aware of his multitude of contributions to the field. His ability to see what animals were actually doing changed how we viewed first primates, then other species. He shared these insights through both traditional scientific outputs, such as journal articles and scientific presentations, and less common outputs, such as 15 books and two TED talks viewed millions of times. What may be less well known is his impact as a mentor. Here, 25 of us who were Frans' graduate students, postdocs, and long‐term research assistants share his personal impact on our lives.


Diretrizes da UICN CSE sobre conflitos e coexistência entre humanos e animais selvagens
  • Book
  • Full-text available

November 2023

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104 Reads

Essas Diretrizes estão centradas em Princípios fundamentais de compreensão e gerenciamento de conflitos entre humanos e animais selvagens: (1) Não causar danos, (2) Entender os problemas e o contexto, (3) Trabalhar em conjunto, (4) Integrar ciência e política e (5) Possibilitar caminhos sustentáveis. Esses se espelham em uma Lista de Verificação de Boas Práticas, contendo 10 perguntas-chave que são elaboradas em 32 capítulos curtos. Recomendamos que o usuário mantenha os Princípios e a Lista de Verificação de Boas Práticas como referência e consulte os capítulos conforme necessário e quando for relevante para determinados contextos e situações.

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An overview of the captivity effect in vertebrates.
Two Asian elephants eat together after pulling ropes to gain access to an out-of-reach table. This is a classic cognitive test of cooperation. Image: J.M. Plotnik.
The endangered brain: actively preserving ex-situ animal behaviour and cognition will benefit in-situ conservation

August 2023

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231 Reads

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5 Citations

Royal Society Open Science

Endangered species have small, unsustainable population sizes that are geographically or genetically restricted. Ex-situ conservation programmes are therefore faced with the challenge of breeding sufficiently sized, genetically diverse populations earmarked for reintroduction that have the behavioural skills to survive and breed in the wild. Yet, maintaining historically beneficial behaviours may be insufficient, as research continues to suggest that certain cognitive-behavioural skills and flexibility are necessary to cope with human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC). This paper begins by reviewing interdisciplinary studies on the ‘captivity effect’ in laboratory, farmed, domesticated and feral vertebrates and finds that captivity imposes rapid yet often reversible changes to the brain, cognition and behaviour. However, research on this effect in ex-situ conservation sites is lacking. This paper reveals an apparent mismatch between ex-situ enrichment aims and the cognitive-behavioural skills possessed by animals currently coping with HIREC. After synthesizing literature across neuroscience, behavioural biology, comparative cognition and field conservation, it seems that ex-situ endangered species deemed for reintroduction may have better chances of coping with HIREC if their natural cognition and behavioural repertoires are actively preserved. Evaluating the effects of environmental challenges rather than captivity per se is recommended, in addition to using targeted cognitive enrichment.


Fig. 2. Proportion of choices in which the target odour was selected as a function of diminishing
Fig. 3. Proportion of choices in which the target odour was selected as a function of diminishing
Evidence for ancestral olfactory sensitivity but not discrimination across two living elephant species

April 2023

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63 Reads

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1 Citation

While African savanna and Asian elephants split between 4.2-9 MYA, they are often regarded as one united group, ‘elephants,’ even in the scientific literature. This is concerning, as while both are keystone species in their respective habitats, each face different environmental pressures and have rarely been compared experimentally. Savanna elephants must locate resources that vary spatially and temporally across patchy savannas, while Asian elephants do so within dense forests containing high biodiversity. Both species use olfaction to guide decision-making, however, considering their ecologies, we hypothesize that their olfactory abilities differ. Thus, we investigated the sensitivity and detection limits of both savanna and Asian elephants’ olfactory systems, as well as changes in these limits in a complex odour environment using two odour-based choice experiments. While both species correctly detected a target odour – savanna elephants detected it at 50 parts per million (ppm) and Asian elephants at 100 ppm – only the savanna elephants’ limit changed (to 1,000 ppm) in the complex odour environment. Our findings suggest that these species have similar olfactory sensitivity, which probably evolved in a shared ancestor, but divergent olfactory discrimination abilities, which are likely a result of variation in both the density and species diversity of their habitats.


Innovating to solve a novel puzzle: Wild Asian elephants vary in their ability to problem solve

April 2023

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61 Reads

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1 Citation

An animal’s capacity for innovation ¬or solving novel problems likely has important implications for how quickly they can adapt to environmental change. Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) living in zoos have previously demonstrated a capacity to innovate, but problem solving has never been studied experimentally in a wild elephant population. We installed puzzle boxes with multiple possible solutions inside a protected area in western Thailand to determine individual variation in innovation, as well as other behavioral traits associated with elephants’ problem solving, including persistence, exploratory diversity, and neophilia. We recorded 77 elephants approaching the puzzle box, with 44 interacting with the box in their first exposure. Individuals varied widely in their success opening the doors of the puzzle box. Such success was influenced by persistence and exploratory diversity in both the first interaction as well as across multiple interactions. However, when considering each individual’s overall innovation scores, which represented how many different doors elephants were able to open across all of their interactions with the puzzle box, only greater persistence and interaction number were associated with reaching a higher innovation score. We observed that elephants who interacted with the box multiple times learned to open a door of any type more quickly as their interactions increased, but we did not see evidence of learning to open specific door types over time. Overall, this study about how innovation and its associated behaviors vary in wild elephants not only informs our understanding of how a capacity for problem solving is expressed, but also how well elephants may be able to adapt to, overcome or avoid increasingly frequent interactions with humans within their natural habitat.


Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication

April 2023

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203 Reads

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18 Citations

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Humans are unique in their sophisticated culture and societal structures, their complex languages, and their extensive tool use. According to the human self-domestication hypothesis, this unique set of traits may be the result of an evolutionary process of self-induced domestication, in which humans evolved to be less aggressive and more cooperative. However, the only other species that has been argued to be self-domesticated besides humans so far is bonobos, resulting in a narrow scope for investigating this theory limited to the primate order. Here, we propose an animal model for studying self-domestication: the elephant. First, we support our hypothesis with an extensive cross-species comparison, which suggests that elephants indeed exhibit many of the features associated with self-domestication (e.g., reduced aggression, increased prosociality, extended juvenile period, increased playfulness, socially regulated cortisol levels, and complex vocal behavior). Next, we present genetic evidence to reinforce our proposal, showing that genes positively selected in elephants are enriched in pathways associated with domestication traits and include several candidate genes previously associated with domestication. We also discuss several explanations for what may have triggered a self-domestication process in the elephant lineage. Our findings support the idea that elephants, like humans and bonobos, may be self-domesticated. Since the most recent common ancestor of humans and elephants is likely the most recent common ancestor of all placental mammals, our findings have important implications for convergent evolution beyond the primate taxa, and constitute an important advance toward understanding how and why self-domestication shaped humans' unique cultural niche.


Animal Behaviour

March 2023

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301 Reads

The potential success of wildlife damage prevention measures can be significantly increased by taking the natural behaviour of animals into account, identifying ways in which some species have already adapted to the presence of humans and applying this knowledge elsewhere. It is also important to understand how individual differences in behaviour (animal and human personality) can vary the perception, presence and intensity of conflict from one landscape or conflict location to the next. The chapter includes sections on: Animal decision making - negative impacts on human-dominated landscapes and ‘problem’ animals; key behavioural considerations; HWC scenarios linked to animal behaviour; and concludes with a step-by-step guide to considering animal behaviour in human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategy development.


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Citations (35)


... As fence posts were unguarded on the outside, they could topple any post without danger of electric shock, when entering the park, hence could re-enter from any location. Our results suggest that elephants devised solutions to problems based on their evaluation and chose appropriate methods to given situations, thus confirming their insightful problem solving ability as postulated by Jacobson et al. (2023). ...

Reference:

How did the elephant cross the fence? Electric fence crossing by elephants in Udawalawe, Sri Lanka
Innovating to solve a novel puzzle: wild Asian elephants vary in their ability to problem solve
  • Citing Article
  • September 2023

Animal Behaviour

... The 31 million humans who live here are demographically represented as predominantly Hindu or Muslim, and as commonly speaking Assamese or Bengali, yet this characterisation does not capture the rich heterogeneity of its people. An 'Assamese person' represents a complex mix of linguistic, historical, ethnic, and political identities, a population made up of those Indigenous to the region and those who trace pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories from different parts of South and Southeast Asia -a diversity that likely interacts with the plasticity of elephants, who also express developmental and behavioural differences as they become alongside humans in different contexts (Clark et al. 2023). At these biological, social, and ecological intersections, there are many kinds of humanelephant worlds. ...

The endangered brain: actively preserving ex-situ animal behaviour and cognition will benefit in-situ conservation

... These species are phylogenetically distant from one another, so prestige here would probably arise from convergent (or parallel) evolution, rather than by common ancestry. It is not surprising that similarly social animals might converge on similar cognitive strategies and mechanisms for solving recurrent adaptive problems (Arbilly and Laland, 2017;Plotnik and Clayton, 2015). And high on the list of such problems for social animals will be securing cooperation within groups and effective forms of leadership for cooperative groups. ...

Convergent Cognitive Evolution across Animal Taxa: Comparisons of Chimpanzees, Corvids, and Elephants
  • Citing Chapter
  • May 2015

... These studies provide some evidence that captive birds can retain their wild-like skills under certain environmental conditions but offer little insight into the level of variation one might expect across different environments, thus calling for increased replication. One recent pair of studies in an endangered species, the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), showed that both captive [140] and wild [141] elephants can innovate on a similar problem-solving task, although the authors did not compare performance between the populations. It is also likely that cognitive flexibility varies within species and within populations [112,141], suggesting that considering individual variation in certain cognitive traits, and its environmental or genetic determinants, should also be an important factor when considering how best to select ex-situ individuals for reintroduction. ...

Innovating to solve a novel puzzle: Wild Asian elephants vary in their ability to problem solve
  • Citing Preprint
  • April 2023

... Human-carnivore conflicts present challenges to the conservation and management of carnivore populations worldwide (Ripple et al., 2014;Treves & Karanth, 2003;Woodruff et al., 2005). Human-carnivore conflict can occur when carnivore (or, more broadly, predator) presence or behavior elicits actual or perceived, direct and recurring threats to human interests (IUCN, 2023). The study of such conflicts and their prevention, or, more generally, of the conditions that support carnivores and humans successfully coexisting with one another, is broadly termed "human-carnivore conflict and coexistence." ...

IUCN SSC guidelines on human-wildlife conflict and coexistence: first edition

... Here, we quantitatively investigated whether social play was contagious in a captive colony of savannah African elephants (Loxodonta africana). African elephants live in multilevel societies with family units composed of kin females and offspring and they are a good model to investigate this issue because they show a wide array of social play patterns, used to socialize with peers and establish long-term relationships (Lee, 1987;Lee and Moss, 2014;Raviv et al., 2023). Based on the Table 1 Summary of behavioural matching types. ...

Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

... These measures extend beyond conventional practices to embrace innovative solutions capable of addressing the evolving challenges faced by photographers in safeguarding their equipment. Esteemed camera specialists [6], [7], have extensively documented instances where photographers have incurred significant financial losses due to various factors such as fungal growth, dust accumulation, and scratches on lenses. These documented cases underscore the urgent need for effective preventive measures to mitigate the risks associated with optical equipment maintenance. ...

Day and night camera trap videos are effective for identifying individual wild Asian elephants

... Although which cause is more relevant cannot be determined at present, regardless of the proximate cause of this behaviour, it may reduce the actual risk of indirect trophic transmission of pathogens from maggots to birds. Birds may perceive the infection risk associated with carcasses through indirect cues such as appearance and/or odour, suggesting that avoiding these cues may be adaptive for them [1,21]. Nonetheless, the residual contents inside maggots frequently include pathogenic bacteria and toxins (e.g. ...

Disgust in animals and the application of disease avoidance to wildlife management and conservation

... By taking into account an elephant's perspective, we may be able to design more effective mitigation methods [35]. For example, elephants have an excellent sense of smell [36] and use olfaction to navigate their world, for foraging, and for social decision making [37,38]. ...

A “thinking animal” in conflict: studying wild elephant cognition in the shadow of anthropogenic change
  • Citing Article
  • August 2022

Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

... Also, the funding of human-elephant conflict research has increased from 2020 (n = 28) to 2022 (n = 43), which reflects as a probable cause of researchers' growing interest in elephant conservation. Neil and Greengrass, 2022; Neupane et al., 2022;Chan et al., 2022;Othman et al., 2022;Hahn et al., 2022;Thant et al., 2022, Ball et al., 2022Prins et al., 2022;Abram et al., 2022). ...

Acknowledging the Relevance of Elephant Sensory Perception to Human–Elephant Conflict Mitigation

Animals