African elephants are the largest land animals on earth and significantly larger than their relatives in Asia, from which they are separated by millions of years of evolution. Nevertheless, Asian elephants have brains that are 20 per cent heavier, as researchers from Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) were able to demonstrate. They also showed that elephant brains grow to three times their normal weight after birth. The results, published in the scientific journal PNAS Nexus, provide explanations for differences in behaviour between African and Asian elephants as well as for the pachyderms' long youth, during which they gain enormous experience and learn social skills.
"The difference in brain weight is perhaps the most important difference between these two elephant species," says Malav Shah, a doctoral student in Prof Dr Michael Brecht's research group at the Department of Biology at HU. "This could be an approach to explain important behavioural differences between Asian and African elephants." For example, both species show clear differences in their interaction with humans. Asian elephants have been partially domesticated over thousands of years and used as work and pack animals in different cultures and regions. With African elephants, there are only a few isolated cases in which domestication as a farm animal was only partially successful.
Further information
Press release of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research