Wild savanna elephants check who is watching before they gesture, a study of about 840 gestures finds

Every test of intent in the study is something an observer can see. Attention checks and repeated signals ^[3][4] separate a gesture aimed at one animal from a display that would go off with or without an audience. Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna, the lead author, said the gestures themselves are easy to notice. "They may fling their trunk or spread their ears wide, and you intuitively understand that 'they mean business.' But until now, we didn't know whether wild elephants were using these gestures to communicate intentionally," she said ^[9].

For a first systematic study ^[1], the sample is modest. More than 90 hours of observation during competitive encounters in Addo Elephant National Park and Marakele National Park yielded around 840 gestures ^[2]. That is at most about nine an hour ^[12]. The phys.org account does not say how many individual elephants produced them. That count would show whether the repertoire belongs to many animals or to a handful of especially combative ones.

The authors read the dual-use count as flexibility: elephants do not tie a gesture to a single goal ^[6]. Only 12 of the 33 gesture types seen in successful exchanges were used for one goal alone ^[13]. Angela Stoeger, the senior author, a University of Vienna professor who mainly studies elephant vocal communication, wants the field to widen the channels it records. "These findings underscore why studying multiple modalities is essential. In the future, studying the interplay of acoustic, visual, tactile and seismic signals, together with context, will finally reveal their messages," she said ^[10].

The comparison with apes comes from Eleuteri. "Such extensive, flexible gestural repertoires have previously been shown in apes and a few other primates. Finding the same in elephants is particularly exciting because elephants are so evolutionarily distant from primates. It suggests that sophisticated gestural communication may have evolved convergently in species that share advanced intelligence and complex social lives," she said ^[8].

In my view, the intent result is the firm part of this paper, and the convergence argument is a hypothesis it makes more plausible. That argument pairs sophisticated gesture with intelligence and complex social life across a small number of lineages ^[8]. Elephants add a distant case to the pattern. A pattern across species cannot show that one trait produces the other.

The team also compared its two South African populations with the ElephantVoices database, built from observations in Kenya and Mozambique ^[7]. "The populations shared the same gesture types, suggesting that elephants may share a common gestural 'vocabulary' across populations," Eleuteri said ^[14].

Elephants are losing habitat, and the loss brings them into conflict with people ^[16]. Lucy Bates of the University of Portsmouth, a co-author, said: "This work is important because humans and elephants increasingly come into contact with each other, as human populations expand in elephant range states" ^[15].