In the
wild, whenever you see an adult elephant all alone, you
can safely bet it is an adult male. Just as female
elephants never like to be alone, and choose to spend
their entire lives in the company of their mothers,
sisters and daughters, the very opposite is true of
adult males. Once they leave their family herd at
puberty, they spend the rest of their lives—thirty or
more years—wandering the forests and fields alone.
And,
there is something that is particularly unusual
about male elephants. Every few months,
individuals go in and out of a period known as
musth. When this happens, testosterone levels
rise sharply and the male secretes a thick oil
from the temporal glands on the sides of his
head.
photo M. Noonan
He
also develops a strong-smelling urine that he
sprays onto his own legs as he travels. He
becomes very irritable at this time and he
typically picks a fight with any other male
elephant that he encounters.
photo M. Noonan
In some
ways it is like the aggressive "rutting season" that can
be seen in many hoofed animals. However, one of the
oddest things about this phenomenon is that different
male elephants go into musth at different times of the
year. In other words, they go through their aggressive
periods individually, without being synchronized to each
other and without being synchronized to any particular
season.
At this
point, it’s very difficult for scientists to understand
how this trait is adaptive—that is, how the musth period
serves the reproductive fitness of the males. Whether a
male elephant is in musth or not, he spends most of his
time on the move looking for females. And whether he is
in musth or not, he will eagerly breed with any
receptive females that he encounters. So why he
periodically goes through this special state is
something that we have to admit that we just don’t
understand very well about male elephants.
