CREDIT: COURTESY OF JOSHUA PLOTNIK, FRANS DE WAAL, AND DIANA REISS
Very few creatures have the cerebral wherewithal to recognize themselves in a mirror: humans, apes, dolphins, and now--elephants.
Joshua Plotnik, a psychology graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues put a jumbo-sized mirror in the elephant enclosure at New York City's Bronx Zoo and watched the reactions of three adult female Asian elephants. All showed signs of self-recognition: One, for example, used the tip of her trunk to explore her mouth in the mirror. Another passed the gold standard "mark test" for self-recognition, using her trunk to examine a white X painted on her forehead, the researchers reported online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Such self-awareness, says Plotnik, may be part of a more general ability to distinguish one's self from other individuals, which in turn may be needed for the altruistic behavior observed among elephants in the wild. The study "shows us that so many more species may be capable of these complex abilities if we figure out the right ways of asking the questions," says parrot-studier Irene Pepperberg, who teaches comparative psychology at Harvard University.
