The observational work was carried out in two South African protected areas, Addo Elephant National Park and Marakele National Park, where the team accumulated more than 90 hours of direct observation of elephants in competitive, or agonistic, contexts. From those hours the researchers logged approximately 840 individual gesture instances, each one catalogued by form, modality, and the apparent goal it served. The dataset allowed the team to ask a question that has long fascinated cognitive scientists: when an elephant flings its trunk or spreads its ears wide at a rival, is it simply reacting, or is it trying to change the behavior of another individual on purpose?

The answer, the researchers report, is that the elephants were gesturing in a recipient-directed and goal-directed way, which is precisely what theories of intentional communication predict. Before and during a gesture, elephants visually checked whether the intended recipient was paying attention to them. They adapted the modality of their signal according to the recipient’s visual attention, for example favoring visual gestures when the other animal was looking and shifting toward tactile signals when it was not. After gesturing, they waited for a response. And when the recipient failed to respond in a way that satisfied their apparent goal, they persisted, producing further gestures. This chain of behaviors, attention-checking, audience-adjusting, response-waiting, and persistence, is considered a hallmark of first-order intentionality in animal communication research.

Lead author Vesta Eleuteri described the phenomenon in vivid terms. If you spend time observing wild elephants, she noted, you cannot help but notice their conspicuous gestures: they may fling their trunk or spread their ears wide, and an observer intuitively understands that they mean business. But until now, she explained, nobody knew whether wild elephants were using these gestures to communicate intentionally. The new findings show, for the first time, that in competitive situations wild elephants intentionally use over 40 different gesture types, composed of 32 gesture actions, to achieve two main goals: asking their recipients to move away, or to stop what they are doing.

One of the most striking results concerns flexibility. Of the 33 gesture types recorded in successful communications, 21, or 64 percent, were used for both meanings. That means the same physical gesture, an ear flap, a trunk throw, or a directed approach, could serve either to push a rival back or to halt an ongoing action, depending on the context. Elephants, in other words, do not rigidly pair each gesture with a single fixed goal the way a fixed signal in a simple signaling system would. Instead, they communicate flexibly, relying on shared context and the recipient’s response to disambiguate meaning. This kind of flexible, context-dependent repertoire had previously been documented in apes and a handful of other primates, making its appearance in elephants a remarkable case of evolutionary convergence.

Eleuteri emphasized exactly that point. Such extensive, flexible gestural repertoires have previously been shown in apes and a few other primates, she said, and finding the same in elephants is particularly exciting because elephants are so evolutionarily distant from primates. The two lineages last shared a common ancestor on the order of a hundred million years ago, so the similarity in communicative sophistication cannot be explained by close relatedness. Instead, the researchers suggest, sophisticated gestural communication may have evolved convergently in species that share advanced intelligence and complex social lives, a pattern that also raises questions about which other big-brained, long-lived social animals might possess comparable repertoires that have simply never been systematically catalogued.

The study also took a comparative step across populations. The team compared the gestures used by the two South African populations they observed, and then compared their findings with the ElephantVoices database, which is based on long-term observations of elephant populations in Kenya and Mozambique. The result was notable: the populations shared the same gesture types. That overlap suggests elephants may share a common gestural vocabulary across populations, rather than each group inventing its own idiosyncratic signals. For a species with fission-fusion social dynamics, in which family groups split and recombine over vast ranges, a broadly shared signal set would make it easier for elephants that have never met to understand one another quickly, including in tense competitive encounters.

Co-author Dr Lucy Bates of the University of Portsmouth highlighted the sheer effort behind the discovery. Tracking and understanding that communication is not easy, she said, because it takes a lot of painstaking work. Identifying so many different gesture types, as ways of communicating clear messages to move away or stop what you are doing, is really exciting, she added. She drew a direct parallel to humans, who use gesture all the time to get meaning across to the people they are talking with. Knowing that elephants also use these signals to communicate with each other, she suggested, points to gesturing as a possible feature of highly intelligent animals that lead complex social lives, rather than a quirk of any single lineage.

Senior author Professor Angela Stoeger of the University of Vienna, whose primary research focus is elephant vocal communication, placed the findings in a broader multimodal context. The results, she said, underscore why studying multiple modalities is essential. In the future, she explained, studying the interplay of acoustic, visual, tactile, and seismic signals, together with context, will finally reveal the full messages elephants exchange. Elephants are famous for producing low-frequency rumbling calls that travel through the air and ground, and they also touch one another constantly with their trunks. The new gestural dataset provides a foundation for understanding intentional visual signaling in wild elephants, but the authors stress that it is only a starting point, and they call for further research into how elephants use gestures in other contexts beyond competition, such as cooperation, caregiving, and courtship.

The findings also carry practical weight for conservation. Elephants face a range of pressures, including habitat loss that increasingly brings them into conflict with humans across their shrinking ranges. Dr Bates argued that the work matters precisely because humans and elephants increasingly come into contact as human populations expand in elephant range states. Understanding how elephants communicate when they are feeling threatened, she said, could help people better read their intentions or recognize when they do not want humans around, giving people the chance to move away before interactions become dangerous. In effect, the same gesture vocabulary that elephants use to tell a rival to back off could one day serve as an early-warning system for people living at the edge of elephant country, translating a flared ear or a thrust trunk into a clear and potentially life-saving instruction.

Subject of Research: Intentional gestural communication in wild African savannah elephants during competitive interactions

Article Title: ‘Move away’ and ‘stop that!’: Wild elephants use a rich gestural repertoire intentionally to “mean business”

Article References: ‘Move away’ and ‘stop that!’: Wild elephants use a rich gestural repertoire intentionally to “mean business”. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: elephants, animal communication, gestures, intentionality, Animal Cognition, African savannah elephant, behavioral ecology, evolutionary convergence, conservation, human-elephant conflict, South Africa, Move