(STUDY FINDS) – Elephants benefit from having older siblings, especially sisters, new researcher reveals. Researchers studying semi-captive Asian elephants in Myanmar have found that calves benefit from having older sisters more than from having older brothers.
Oxford University researchers, along with colleagues in Myanmar and Finland, discovered that Asian elephants influence their younger siblings from early life to old age. Calves raised with older siblings have increased long-term survival compared to calves that do not have siblings. The study also revealed that elder sisters have a bigger impact than elder brothers.
Female elephants raised with older sisters had higher long-term survival rates and reproduced for the first time an average of two years earlier compared to those raised with older brothers. Reproducing at an earlier age is usually leads to more offspring over the course of an elephant’s lifetime.
