Personality and behaviour of three captive African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana)

Abstract

This study explores the diversity in individual response for three captive African Savannah Ele-phants (Loxodonta africana) to variations in the daily number of zoo visitors. The nocturnal behav-iour of the elephants was observed in two periods with a factor 5.1 difference in numbers of zoo visitors. Ten behavioural expressions for each elephant were compared for the two periods. Data was collected with surveillance cameras for ten hours (20:00 to 06:00) throughout six nights. Fur-thermore, the data was compared to a similar study on the same elephants performed two years earlier. Both studies revealed a significant difference in behaviour between low activity and high visitor activity periods for all three elephants in the behaviour ’Walk’. No overall significant differ-ence was found in the other behavioural expressions. Clear difference in reaction norms was found between the matriarch and the two subordinates for the behaviours: ’Feed from ground’, ’Inactive’, ’Walk’ and ’Other’. This study shows that elephants in captivity are influenced by an increase in the number of zoo visitors, and that the personality or social status of the elephant may provide them with different resilience to disturbance.