1. Why is the leader of an elephant a female?
Elephants are intelligent and long-lived social animals. They take the family as the unit and the oldest female elephant as the leader. It not only controls the daily activity time, action route and foraging place of the elephants, but also commands the elephants to defend themselves when they are in danger. Miraculously, as the leader, the females often have more ecological knowledge and can find hidden water sources.
In nature, males are often powerful, and the strongest males are often the leaders of ethnic groups. But why aren't elephants like this? This is mainly due to the following two points:
(1) Elephants live long and have 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. However, the average life expectancy of the raised elephants can reach 80 years, and the longest life expectancy reaches 120 years. Because elephants have the characteristics of longevity, their reproduction is relatively slow, and they adopt intensive breeding strategy.
Specifically, females usually give birth to their first baby before the age of 20, and then breed every 4-6 years. It takes a year and a half to two years for a female elephant to give birth to a calf. The newborn elephant is one meter high and weighs 200 kilograms. The elephant will not grow up until at least 10 years old, and this long growth period needs the care of other members of the elephant group.
It is precisely because of this that years of companionship have made the elephants very dependent on their mothers, which laid an important foundation for the elephants to become matriarchal society.
(2) Elephants often act alone.
Adult male Asian elephants, who are strong and have tusks, often move alone. This is because elephants have a development strategy, that is, "elephants keep women instead of men." Specifically, when the Xiao Xiong elephant in the herd grows up to puberty, the young females in the herd begin to "touch", and when the elders in the herd find out, they will slowly kick it out of the house.
Many adult male elephants don't usually spend time with females and young elephants. They only get together during the mating season. It is precisely because male elephants move alone that the matriarchal leader of the herd will consolidate its position.
Second, what role does the male elephant assume?
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 was that male elephants were not decisive for the survival of elephants, and shooting would not affect the reproduction of the whole elephant group. But with these years of research, scientists have found that besides reproduction, the male elephant population also plays an important role.
(1) protection
Male elephants are strong and will follow the herd during the breeding season. Not only will it obey the arrangement of the leader, but it will also protect the whole elephant group independently.
(2) Information transmission
Male elephants roam a vast territory, which makes it very difficult for people to track them. However, the leader of the herd can have magical ecological knowledge, which is not unrelated to the males roaming around. These older and experienced male elephants are very important for the information transmission between generations of elephants.