Behavioural Analysis of Asian Elephants at Smithsonian National Zoo

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are classified as endangered species by the IUCN, facing major threats of habitat loss and human-elephant conflicts. With one-third of their population in a human-care setting, research among these environments is important to enable the species’ survival and hopeful reintroduction to the wild. The Smithsonian National Zoo houses seven Asian elephants: six females, Kamala, Bozie, Maharani, Swarna, Trong Nhi and Nhi Linh and one male, Spike. The newest addition to the herd, Trong Nhi and her daughter Nhi Linh arrived from the Rotterdam Zoo in November. To help them adapt to their environment and new herd, I observed and categorized their behaviors through video recordings on the ZooMonitor camera system. I observed 15 hours of video footage, with behaviors marked on an ethogram every four minutes that passed during the observation time. Specifically, Trong Nhi demonstrated stress behaviors, which we investigated when and why this was occurring. Preliminary results indicated that Trong Nhi demonstrated the stress behavior “head bob” before 12:00pm. Although some hours were collected on focusing between the hours 6:30-12:30 pm, there was insufficient data to determine the significance of why it occurred. Future studies will assess the environment around Trong Nhi leading up to the stress behavior which will help better care for her. This can also help the animal team determine when to attempt for Spike and Trong Nhi or Nhi Linh to mate which would be an important step in the conservation of the species.

Hi my name is Gwendolyne Fields and you’re joining me here today at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, currently at the Elephant Barn House.

You can join me inside to meet some of the elephants. Here we have Nhi Linh and Trong Nhi, mother and daughter, 19 years old and 9 years old. For my OSCAR Research project, I focused on them and their behaviour.

To tell you more about the elephants here at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, we have seven elephants. So we have six females and one male, Spike. Our other females along with Trong Nhi and Nhi Lhin are Kamala, Rani or Maharani, we also have Swarna and Bozie. These girls came to us in November and they are from Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands. And that’s why I focused on them because we do not know much about their behaviours and it was really important for us to better their care if we understood more about their behaviours themselves.

So to talk more about my research project, I ended up focusing on the stress behaviour that Trong Nhi was showing. She basically would raise her head up and do a big yawn or bob her head. So we wanted to look more into that and see why that was occurring and when it was happening. So we did a preliminary research portion where we looking at video footages for a day and split it between two hours within different parts of the day to see what time of day would she maybe show this behaviour.

So to give you an idea about what the day is like working with the animal keepers. We start off our day feeding the elephants at 6:30 in the morning and then we start cleaning the enclosures, meaning picking up poop and cleaning drinkers, as you can see in this video. The animal keepers do their health checks on the elephants to make sure there are no injuries and they all seem in good condition. Once we have our lunch break, we feed them again with bamboos and green vegetables and fill up on their hay. This is what I help with once a week, on top of doing my research project.

So as you can see here, this is a video of Trong Nhi and Nhi Lihn first meeting Spike. One of the reasons that the girls came to the Zoo here is to eventually get them to mate with Spike. Further along the research, the behaviours seen with other members of the herd, including Spike would be very beneficial.

The data of Trong Nhi and Nhi Lhin were collected through an ethogram, essentially a spreadsheet of the different behaviors that were observed for the elephants. When doing the video footage, I used the ZooMonitor Camera System and was able to view footages of the elephants for up to 2 months in the past.

With the time I had during the semester on top of going to the zoo once a week, I was only able to look through 15 hours of footage during two days. This obviously was not enough to establish a real connection between the stress behavior that Trong Nhi was demonstrating and what was causing it, but we did notice that Trong Nhi demonstrated her stress behavior during earlier parts of the day, before 12:00 pm.

Overall, we have a better idea of when we should maybe pay more attention to this stress behavior and have the team come up with a solution to better her care. Thank you for watching, I hope you guys enjoyed your day at the zoo with the Elephants at Smithsonian.