1. Why is the leader of the elephant a female?
Elephants are intelligent and long-lived social animals. They take the family as the unit, with the oldest female elephant as the leader. It can not only control the elephant's daily activity time, action route and foraging place, but also command the elephant to defend itself in case of danger. Incredibly, as leaders, females often have more ecological knowledge and can find hidden water sources.
In nature, males are often very powerful, and the strongest males are often the leaders of ethnic groups. But why don't elephants do this? This is mainly due to the following two points:
(1) Elephants have a long life and a slow growth cycle.
The normal life span of elephants is around sixty or seventy years old, and some wild elephants can live to be over one hundred years old. The average life span of elephants can reach 80 years, and the longest life span can reach 120 years. Because elephants have the characteristics of long life and reproduction is relatively slow, intensive breeding strategy is adopted.
Specifically, females usually give birth to their first child before the age of 20, and then reproduce every 4-6 years. It takes a year and a half to two years for a mother elephant to give birth to her calf. The newborn elephant is one meter high and weighs 200 kilograms. Elephants will not grow up until at least 10 years old. This long growing period needs the care of other members of the elephant group.
It is precisely because of this that many years of companionship have made elephants have great dependence on their mothers, which has laid an important foundation for elephants to become matriarchal society.
(2) Elephants often act alone.
Adult male Asian elephants are strong and have tusks, and usually act alone. This is because elephants have a development strategy, that is, "elephants raise women instead of men." Specifically, when the Xiao Xiong elephant in the herd reaches puberty, the young females in the herd begin to "touch", and when the elders in the herd find it, they will slowly kick it out of the house.
Many adult male elephants usually don't spend time with their mothers and calves. They only get together during the mating season. Because the male elephant acts alone, the matriarchal leader in the herd will consolidate his position.
Second, what role does the male elephant play?
Elephants are matriarchal society, so what social responsibilities do male elephants have besides cooperating with reproduction?
In fact, many scientists have studied this problem, because the reason why many hunters hunted male elephants in the early days is that male elephants are not decisive for the survival of elephants, and shooting will not affect the reproduction of the whole elephant group. But after years of research, scientists have found that besides reproduction, the number of male elephants also plays an important role.
(1) protection
Male elephants are strong and follow the herd during the breeding season. It will not only obey the arrangement of the leader, but also protect the whole elephant group independently.
(2) Information transmission
Elephants roam the vast territory, which makes it difficult for people to follow them. However, the leader of the herd can have magical ecological knowledge, which is not unrelated to the wandering males. These older and experienced male elephants are very important for information transmission between generations of elephants.