Elephants are extremely intelligent, social creatures. peeling banana, flush And age their dead, solve problems And greeting your friends.

Now scientists have added another skill to that list: using a hose to keep themselves clean and possibly prank each other. Researchers describe these behaviors in a new paper published last week in the journal. Current Biology.

“I believe that elephants, and probably many other animals, do all kinds of interesting things that we often overlook or dismiss as one-off or anecdotal,” he says Lucy Batesbehavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, who was not involved in the research ScienceSara Reardon.

54 years old asian elephant The individual named Mary at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers with her mastery not only in using the proboscis but also in adapting its use to different purposes.

Mary, who was born in the wild and lives in other zoos, cleverly used her trunk to shower herself with water. He adopted a variety of techniques to shower different parts of his body, including a lasso-like movement that allowed him to reach his back. Mary also varied her grip on the hose to reach various parts of her body and lifted one of her hind legs so she could shower.

The researchers also presented Mary with different sizes of tornadoes to observe her reactions. He preferred the zoo’s standard-sized trunk to smaller or larger ones, probably because other sizes were harder to handle and move with his trunk.

“Mary is the queen of showering,” says study co-author Michael Brechtis a computational neuroscientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. expression.

Watch this elephant transform a trunk into an advanced shower tool

But another Asian elephant, 12-year-old Anchali, seemed to understand how to use her trunk to play tricks on Mary. While Mary was showering, Anchali would frequently squeeze the hose, clamp it, and stand over it, thus cutting off the flow of water.

Researchers suggest that Anchali’s actions may have been deliberate attempts to “sabotage” Mary’s shower time. Over time he got better at bending the hose and did it more often. The young elephant also developed a new behavior that the team calls trunk standing, which involves leaning on its trunk to straighten it.

Anchali might be wandering around playfully. However, according to researchers, it is also possible that Mary was acting out of spite, as she periodically acted aggressively towards Anchali.

“That’s something we really want to know; does he think it’s funny?” Brecht tells GuardNicola Davis. “I think it’s very funny, but we really don’t know. Maybe he’s just trying to be bad.”

Researchers could not prove that Anchali’s antics were for revenge; In another experiment, they found that he mostly interacted with the hose closest to him rather than the one Mary was using. However, they note that it is not clear whether Anchali knew which tornado was heading towards Mary.

Captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) also exhibited “extremely lateral” behavior when handling the hoses, meaning they showered one side of their body more often than the other. These preferences are related to the elephant’s “proboscis” or right body or left body (similar to right-handedness and left-handedness in humans). For example, Mary’s torso is turned to the left, and she uses the hose to shower on the left side of her body more than the right side.

The researchers write in the article that Mary’s “graceful and careful” use of the hose while showering is not that surprising, given her physiology. “They suspect it might be able to understand the tornado intuitively because it looks so much like a tornado,” says the study’s co-author. Lena KaufmannHe is also a neuroscientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. New York TimesEmily Anthes.

Yet Mary’s behavior is another example of nonhuman animal tool use. cockatoos, macaques, crows, dolphins et al. Scientists have considered hoses to be “complex” tools because of their length, flexibility, and the dynamics of flowing water.

“I had never thought much about trunks being tools before, but (this research) turns out that elephants have an excellent understanding of these tools,” Brecht says in his statement.