ArticleScientific reports2020
Importance of old bulls: leaders and followers in collective movements of all-male groups in African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana).
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Social ageing: exploring the drivers of late-life changes in social behaviour in mammals.Biology letters · 2022Review
- Simulated poaching affects global connectivity and efficiency in social networks of African savanna elephants-An exemplar of how human disturbance impacts group-living species.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Reduced older male presence linked to increased rates of aggression to non-conspecific targets in male elephants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Coordination during group departures and progressions in the tolerant multi-level society of wild Guinea baboons (Papio papio).Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Function of Trunk-Mediated "Greeting" Behaviours between Male African Elephants: Insights from Choice of Partners.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Seasonality impacts collective movements in a wild group-living bird.Movement ecology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In long-lived social species, older individuals can provide fitness benefits to their groupmates through the imparting of ecological knowledge. Research in this area has largely focused on females in matrilineal societies where, for example, older female African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) are most effective at making decisions crucial to herd survival, and old post-reproductive female resident killer whales (Orcinus orca) lead collective movements in hunting grounds. In contrast, little is known about the role of older males as leaders in long-lived social species. By analysing leadership patterns of all-male African savannah elephant traveling groups along elephant pathways in Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, Botswana, we found that the oldest males were more likely to lead collective movements. Our results challenge the assumption that older male elephants are redundant in the population and raise concerns over the biased removal of old bulls that currently occurs in both legal trophy hunting and illegal poaching. Selective harvesting of older males could have detrimental effects on the wider elephant society through loss of leaders crucial to younger male navigation in unknown, risky environments.
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