Sunday, March 18, 2018

Asian elephants have different personality traits just like humans

Researchers of the University of Turku, Finland, have studied a timber elephant population in Myanmar and discovered that Asian elephant personality manifests through three different factors. The personality factors identified by the researchers are Attentiveness, Sociability and Aggressiveness.

As is commonly known, people have different personalities, and the structure of human personality can be divided into five factors. Other species' behaviour also differs between individuals: some are braver, more social, or aggressive than others.

"These kinds of consistent differences in behaviour are called personality. Personality studies on other species than humans have so far focused on primates, pets and zoo populations, or on species that have a relatively short lifespan. Besides humans, personality studies on other long-lived species living in their natural habitat are rare," says Postdoctoral Researcher and the lead author of the study Martin Seltmann from the Department of Biology at the University of Turku.

The researchers of the University of Turku studied a semi-captive population of timber elephants in Myanmar and discovered that Asian elephants have three different personality factors: Attentiveness, Sociability and Aggressiveness. The researchers also identified that male and female elephants do not differ in these three personality factors.

"Attentiveness is related to how an elephant acts in and perceives its environment. Sociability describes how an elephant seeks closeness to other elephants and humans, and how popular they are as social partners. Aggressiveness shows how aggressively an elephant acts towards other elephants and how much it interferes in their social interaction," describes Dr Seltmann.

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