Elephants live in some of the most complex and resilient societies in the animal kingdom. Individuals die or move away, calves grow up, and newcomers join, but the local communities as a whole usually hold together. Long-term studies of African savanna elephants have shown that, even after poaching or other spikes in deaths, survivors tend to rebuild their lost connections over time. But a new study suggests that resilience may not keep the community intact when steady losses accumulate over time.
Anastasia Madsen, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues analyzed 12 years of observations of wild Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. They found that, once losses began to outpace newcomers, the elephants’ society didn’t just get smaller. It fractured.
