Helen Mylne

PhD topic title: The impact of age on male African savanna elephant social behaviour

PhD supervisors: Professor Dan Franks, Professor Colin Beale, Dr Kate Evans and Dr Jakob Bro-Jorgensen

Biography and research

As a self-proclaimed elephant-aholic, my research into the social behaviour of African savanna elephants is the dream I never thought possible. Male elephants can travel very large distances, often crossing international borders, which makes it very hard to study their long-term movements and social associations. Knowledge of male elephant social behaviour is therefore relatively limited compared to that of females, but males are more commonly involved during human-elephant interactions, making them extremely important when considering conservation actions. It is therefore necessary to improve our knowledge of the lives of male elephants.

I am investigating how the ages of individuals affect their relationships, social position and influence over the social network. Using data from three research charities (Elephants for Africa, the African Lion and Environmental Research Trust (ALERT), and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants), I am constructing male elephant social networks and using them to determine whether male age drives their social structure. This has particular implications for social learning, as we would expect to see older males holding the positions of highest influence within the social network, if younger males are copying them in order to learn. Complementary to this work I am running some behavioural experiments in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, Botswana, to look for evidence of copying behaviour within male groups. By examining whether males are more likely to look at one another following the sounds of lions and humans, we can determine if youngsters are copying the responses of older males in the face of danger.

One of the datasets in this work (that from the Mosi-Oa-Tunya National Park in Zambia) I helped to collate back in 2016, when on my undergraduate industrial placement year with ALERT. It was during this year that I first fell in love with elephants and with the incredible beauty of Southern Africa. After completing my BSc at the University of Bath, I returned to Zimbabwe to work for ALERT as principal researcher on the Zambezi National Park Elephant Project, but was only able to spend five months in this position before starting my Masters by Research at the University of Exeter in 2019. Working on the behaviour of chestnut-crowned babblers in New South Wales, Australia, was an incredible experience and proved to me that animal social behaviour was where I wanted to take my research, but it just wasn’t quite the same as watching the elephants. I finally returned to elephant research in 2021 when starting a PhD that is the perfect combination of elephants and social behaviour. 

Alongside my research I help with undergraduate teaching in statistics, data handling and ecological design, and run the university Meet a PhD sessions to help undergraduates understand the options available to them after graduation. I have given outreach talks to local schools, and worked three times with the Royal Society of Biology to produce outreach resources aimed at school STEM clubs: a video explaining what behavioural ecology is and what I do, a talk about my experiments in Botswana, and a researcher profile as part of a memory game.

Funder

Adapting to the Challenges of a Changing Environment (ACCE) NERC DTP