ArticleScientific reports2019
All-Male Groups in Asian Elephants: A Novel, Adaptive Social Strategy in Increasingly Anthropogenic Landscapes of Southern India.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Effects of organized guarding on mortality from human-elephant conflict in northeast India.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Community mitigation decisions in elephant conflict zones of southern India depend on environmental and socio-economic drivers.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Physiological responses in free-ranging Asian elephant populations living across human-production landscapes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Wild elephants vary in their attraction to novelty across an anthropogenic landscape gradient.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Do elephants really never forget? What we know about elephant memory and a call for further investigation.Learning & behavior · 2025Review
- Article
- Chronic constipation and the brain-gut-microbiome axis: the role of 5-HT signaling and Traditional Chinese Medicine in pathophysiology and treatment.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Review
- Elephants and algorithms: a review of the current and future role of AI in elephant monitoring.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Day and night camera trap videos are effective for identifying individual wild Asian elephants.PeerJ · 2023Article
- Physiological plasticity in elephants: highly dynamic glucocorticoids in African and Asian elephants.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Strategies of protected area use by Asian elephants in relation to motivational state and social affiliations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Understanding the spatial distribution and hot spots of collared Bornean elephants in a multi-use landscape.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Social Behavior and Group Formation in Male Asian Elephants (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Acknowledging the Relevance of Elephant Sensory Perception to Human-Elephant Conflict Mitigation.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Sociality and self-awareness in animals.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Reduced older male presence linked to increased rates of aggression to non-conspecific targets in male elephants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cooperating elephants mitigate competition until the stakes get too high.PLoS biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Male Asian elephants are known to adopt a high-risk high-gain foraging strategy by venturing into agricultural areas and feeding on nutritious crops in order to improve their reproductive fitness. We hypothesised that the high risks to survival posed by increasingly urbanising and often unpredictable production landscapes may necessitate the emergence of behavioural strategies that allow male elephants to persist in such landscapes. Using 1445 photographic records of 248 uniquely identified male Asian elephants over a 23-month period, we show that male Asian elephants display striking emergent behaviour, particularly the formation of stable, long-term all-male groups, typically in non-forested or human-modified and highly fragmented areas. They remained solitary or associated in mixed-sex groups, however, within forested habitats. These novel, large all-male associations, may constitute a unique life history strategy for male elephants in the high-risk but resource-rich production landscapes of southern India. This may be especially true for the adolescent males, which seemed to effectively improve their body condition by increasingly exploiting anthropogenic resources when in all-male groups. This observation further supports our hypothesis that such emergent behaviours are likely to constitute an adaptive strategy for male Asian elephants that may be forced to increasingly confront anthropogenically intrusive environments.
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