ArticlePLoS biology2021
Cooperating elephants mitigate competition until the stakes get too high.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 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
- Cooperation: Behavioral manifestations and neural mechanisms.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Article
- Do Asian elephants plan for mutually-exclusive outcomes?Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Do elephants really never forget? What we know about elephant memory and a call for further investigation.Learning & behavior · 2025Review
- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Persistence is key: investigating innovative problem solving by Asian elephants using a novel multi-access box.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Acknowledging the Relevance of Elephant Sensory Perception to Human-Elephant Conflict Mitigation.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cooperation is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom as it aims to maximize benefits through joint action. Selection, however, may also favor competitive behaviors that could violate cooperation. How animals mitigate competition is hotly debated, with particular interest in primates and little attention paid thus far to nonprimates. Using a loose-string pulling apparatus, we explored cooperative and competitive behavior, as well as mitigation of the latter, in semi-wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Our results showed that elephants first maintained a very high cooperation rate (average = 80.8% across 45 sessions). Elephants applied "block," "fight back," "leave," "move side," and "submission" as mitigation strategies and adjusted these strategies according to their affiliation and rank difference with competition initiators. They usually applied a "fight back" mitigation strategy as a sanction when competition initiators were low ranking or when they had a close affiliation, but were submissive if the initiators were high ranking or when they were not closely affiliated. However, when the food reward was limited, the costly competitive behaviors ("monopoly" and "fight") increased significantly, leading to a rapid breakdown in cooperation. The instability of elephant cooperation as a result of benefit reduction mirrors that of human society, suggesting that similar fundamental principles may underlie the evolution of cooperation across species.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.