How a Baby Elephant Learns to Use Her Trunk, and Who Teaches Her
Wild First Hours
6,150 views
Made with AI: every scene in this video is generated with AI video tools. It is not real footage.
An African elephant calf is about a metre tall and weighs around 120 kilograms when she stands up for the first time, half an hour after birth. Her legs are ready. Her trunk, with tens of thousands of muscles in it, is not. This film follows her first year as a list of five lessons: how to walk, how to drink, how to use her trunk, who looks after her, and what the oldest female knows: who is who and, the researchers suggest, where to find water when the rain fails.
The film is built on published research: elephant mothers and newborn calves tracked by GPS collars in northern Kenya (Taylor et al. 2022, Animal Behaviour), allomothering in the Amboseli elephants (Lee 1987, Animal Behaviour), the social knowledge of matriarchs (McComb et al. 2001, Science), play in wild and captive calves (Webber & Lee 2020, Animals) and the 1993 drought in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania, where 16 of 81 monitored calves died in nine months and families that left the park lost fewer calves than families that stayed (Foley, Pettorelli & Foley 2008, Biology Letters). Newborn size, standing and first-drink times come from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and ElephantVoices; the trunk-skill timeline comes from the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's orphan-care handbook.
This film is an illustrative reconstruction created with AI-generated footage. The individual animals shown are not real. The family, the calf and her walk out of the dry riverbed are our illustration; the numbers from the studies belong to the elephants in those studies, not to the elephants on screen.
Music: YouTube Audio Library.
#WildlifeDocumentary #Elephant #BabyElephant #AfricanWildlife #Nature #AnimalBehavior
1 Comments
How a Baby Elephant Learns to Use Her Trunk, and Who Teaches Her
Wild First Hours
6,150 views
Made with AI: every scene in this video is generated with AI video tools. It is not real footage.
An African elephant calf is about a metre tall and weighs around 120 kilograms when she stands up for the first time, half an hour after birth. Her legs are ready. Her trunk, with tens of thousands of muscles in it, is not. This film follows her first year as a list of five lessons: how to walk, how to drink, how to use her trunk, who looks after her, and what the oldest female knows: who is who and, the researchers suggest, where to find water when the rain fails.
The film is built on published research: elephant mothers and newborn calves tracked by GPS collars in northern Kenya (Taylor et al. 2022, Animal Behaviour), allomothering in the Amboseli elephants (Lee 1987, Animal Behaviour), the social knowledge of matriarchs (McComb et al. 2001, Science), play in wild and captive calves (Webber & Lee 2020, Animals) and the 1993 drought in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania, where 16 of 81 monitored calves died in nine months and families that left the park lost fewer calves than families that stayed (Foley, Pettorelli & Foley 2008, Biology Letters). Newborn size, standing and first-drink times come from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and ElephantVoices; the trunk-skill timeline comes from the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's orphan-care handbook.
This film is an illustrative reconstruction created with AI-generated footage. The individual animals shown are not real. The family, the calf and her walk out of the dry riverbed are our illustration; the numbers from the studies belong to the elephants in those studies, not to the elephants on screen.
Music: YouTube Audio Library.
#WildlifeDocumentary #Elephant #BabyElephant #AfricanWildlife #Nature #AnimalBehavior