Why Matriarchs Matter in Elephant Society

2011/06/09 By Vicki Fishlock Please read the full IFAW article here;http://blog.ifaw.org/2011/06/09/why-matriarchs-matter-in-elephant-society/

Olympia, the young matriarch of the OAs, is a graceful-tusked 31-year-old. She became the matriarch after her mother died in the 2009/2009 drought. How she copes with such a responsibility at a relatively young age will determine how well her family fares.

Whenever I’m asked about elephants and the work I do, I invariably end up talking about matriarchs, as they form both the core of elephant society and the core of this study. Why are matriarchs so important to that society?

A matriarch is a leader of an elephant family, and is usually the oldest female in that family. My particular interest within the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP) focuses on what is happening to families who lost their matriarchs in the devastating 2008/2009 drought.

Elephant families revolve around females. Males leave at puberty and become socially independent, but females remain within their families for their whole lives. They rear their calves alongside their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts. Elephant families are extremely fluid in their association patterns meaning that not all members are together all of the time. This wonderful flexibility and fluidity in elephant society, which we call “fission-fusion”, is one of the things that I find so fascinating about elephants.

Please continue reading here;;http://blog.ifaw.org/2011/06/09/why-matriarchs-matter-in-elephant-society/