In other words, elephants in Sri Lanka don’t have much room to wander. Sri Lanka, at 25,000 square miles, is about the size of West Virginia, which has fewer than 2 million residents Sri Lanka has close to 22 million. The bigger problem is that the human population has also increased. By 2011, the elephant population in Sri Lanka was back up to nearly 6,000, according to a census conducted at watering holes. Today, while the Asian elephant is still listed as an endangered species, its numbers appear to be rising in some regions. Elephants were being bred in captivity and the government was committing more land and water to wild elephant herds. But Eisenberg reported that the situation was looking more promising. The country’s wild population had plummeted from 40,000 at the beginning of the European colonial period in the 1500s to fewer than 3,000 in the late 20th century, largely because of coffee and tea farming. Half a century ago, the problem Eisenberg outlined was the rapid decline of Asian elephants. The elephants are chained during the day but are allowed to roam at night. Mahouts finish bathing a group of elephants at the Myaing Hay Wun Camp in Myanmar. Today’s scientists have outfitted dozens of elephants with GPS collars so they can map their movements via satellite. Eisenberg’s team risked their lives to put visual tags on just three elephants. Some of their methods are now much more high-tech. These days, Smithsonian experts who study Asian elephants are concentrating their efforts in Myanmar. Eisenberg, focused on a Smithsonian Institution expedition to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

That original article, by the pioneering zoologist John F. Venkatesh spends much of his time in Myanmar, administering the PVC pipe test he designed.Įlephant research has come a long way since April 1970, when the first issue of Smithsonian featured an Asian elephant on its cover. “Do different elephants react differently to a novel object-to something that’s new, that they haven’t seen? Do they solve the puzzle differently? Are some of them bolder? Do they come straight up to it, pick it up and throw it?” “What we’re looking for is individual difference in elephants-more or less, personality,” explained Sateesh Venkatesh, a 32-year-old graduate student who is researching elephants under the joint supervision of Hunter College and Smithsonian scientists. The human onlookers giggled in appreciation. Then she munched on her apple where Spike could see, or smell, it. Maharani turned her enormous body around and dragged the pipe along with her, closer to the gate. As she was prying off the lid, Spike’s trunk waved through the bars, as though he were beckoning Maharani to come closer. She used another strategy, rolling her pipe around until she found an opening at one end. Next came 29-year-old Maharani, a spring in her step, ears flapping. The test was designed to incorporate things elephants do in the wild-like stripping bark-but be novel enough to test their interest in new objects. Spike, left, and Maharani find different ways to get apples out of a pipe. Then a keeper lured Spike outdoors and the gate clanked shut. He punched through the paper, pulling out the treat. As Spike held the strange object upright between his tusks, he groped with his trunk until he found a hole covered with paper in the pipe’s center. Apples had been stuffed inside three different compartments, and the task was to get to them. He headed straight for a 150-pound PVC pipe in the middle of the dusty floor, wrapping his trunk around it and easily lifting it from the ground. Spike, a 38-year-old bull, ambled in from the yard. An elephant's trunk has close to 40,000 muscles, and as it’s reaching out to smell you, it can knock you down flat.

As the gate from the outdoor elephant yard lifted, a keeper admonished everyone to stand farther back, even though there were bars separating us from the animals. The building was still closed to visitors, but about a dozen zoo staffers were lined up to watch. On a recent winter morning at Smithsonian's National Zoo, I watched two Asian elephants take a test.

Elephant trunk reaching out outline