Cradle To Grieve, or, Mourning Becomes Eclectic

Science

BASICS

About Death, Just Like Us or Pretty Much Unaware?

Do animals grieve like we do?

By NATALIE ANGIER

Oliver Werner/Getty Images

MOURNING OR CONFUSED? Gana held her dead baby, Claudio, for days.

…Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.

Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away. “The only time I was ever mobbed by langurs was when I tried to inspect a baby corpse,” said the primatologist Sarah Hrdy. Only gradually will she allow the distance between herself and the ever-gnarlier carcass to grow…

…The Hallmark hanky moment alternates with the Roald Dahl macabre. A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Dr. Wilson said, “but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she’ll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way.”…

…Yet adult chimpanzees rarely react with overt sentimentality to the death of another adult, Dr. Wilson said. As a rule, sick or elderly adults go off into the forest to die alone, he said, and those that die in company often do so at the hands of other adults, who “sometimes make sure the victim is dead, and sometimes they don’t,” he said. The same laissez-faire attitude toward death-versus-life applies to chimpanzee hunting behavior. “When they’re hunting red colobus monkeys, they will either kill the monkeys first or simply immobilize them and start eating them while they’re still alive,” Dr. Wilson said. “The monkey will continue screaming and thrashing as they pull its guts out, which is very unpleasant for humans who are watching.”

For some animals, the death of a conspecific is a little tinkle of the dinner bell. A lion will approach another lion’s corpse, give it a sniff and a lick, and if the corpse is fresh enough, will start to eat it. For others, a corpse is considered dangerous and must be properly disposed of. Among naked mole rats, for example, which are elaborately social mammals that spend their entire lives in a system of underground tunnels, a corpse is detected quickly and then dragged, kicked or carried to the communal latrine. And when the latrine is filled, said Paul Sherman of Cornell University, “they seal it off with an earthen plug, presumably for hygienic reasons, and dig a new one.”

Among the social insects, the need for prompt corpse management is considered so pressing that there are dedicated undertakers, workers that within a few minutes of a death will pick up the body and hoist or fly it outside, to a safe distance from hive or nest, the better to protect against possible contagious disease. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees. “You can find mummified mice inside beehives that are completely preserved right down to their whiskers,” said Gene E. Robinson, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

But all is not grim for those dead in tooth and claw. Researchers have determined that elephants deserve their longstanding reputation as exceptionally death-savvy beings, their concern for the remains of their fellows approaching what we might call reverence. Reporting in the journal Biology Letters, Karen McComb of the University of Sussex and her colleagues found that when African elephants were presented with an array of bones and other natural objects, the elephants spent considerably more time exploring the skulls and tusks of elephants than they did anything else, including the skulls of rhinoceroses and other large mammals.

George Wittemyer of Colorado State University and his colleagues described in Applied Animal Behavior Science the extraordinary reactions of different elephants to the death of one of their prominent matriarchs. “One female stood over the body, rocking back and forth,” Dr. Wittemyer said in an interview. “Others raised their foot over her head. Others touched their tusks to hers. They would do their behaviors, and then leave.”

They were saying goodbye, or maybe, Won’t you please come back home? NYT

See also two of my Desert Island articles on these subjects, or any others (below) – and the elephant segment from one of my favorite animal documentaries, the Wisdom of the Wild episode of Nature; the scene where the aged chimp rushes to embrace its remembered caretaker, Linda Koebner, from decades ago will crack the toughest of nuts (or the nuttiest of toughs - Ed.).

BBC News | South Asia | Elephant dies of grief

Damini would stroke her pregnant friend’s stomach with her trunk

An elderly female elephant has died of grief at an Indian zoo after the death of a close friend.

Damini, who was 72, had befriended a younger pregnant elephant called Champakali at the Prince of Wales Zoo in Lucknow.

But she starved herself to death in misery when Champakali died in childbirth.

Their zookeeper is mourning the loss of his two charges. “It will take me some time to get over the death of my two loved ones,” said her keeper, who goes by the name of Kamaal.

The two elephants became inseparable in September after Champakali was brought in pregnant from Dudhwa National Park where she had worked carrying tourists.

Surrogate daughter

She was in Lucknow for maternity leave, and Damini immediately became her best friend and surrogate mother.

According to animal experts, this kind of deep attachment is common among elephants, with older ones often taking a mothering role.

“Elephants are very social animals. They can form very close bonds with others in their social group,” said Pat Thomas, curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo in New York City.

But when Champakali died giving birth to a stillborn calf last month, Damini lost all interest in her food and began starving herself to death.

Zoo officials said she shed tears over her friend’s body, then stood still in her enclosure for days.

Over the next 24 days she barely nibbled her diet of sugar cane, bananas and grass until her legs swelled up and she collapsed.

Grass tent

She then lay still, losing weight and crying, and a week ago stopped eating or drinking her daily 40 gallons of water, despite the hot weather.

Her keepers tried to keep her cool by building around her a makeshift tent of fragrant grass and spraying her with water.

Vets tried to save her by pumping more than 25 gallons of glucose and vitamins into her veins, but she died on Wednesday.

Kamaal has now buried her next to her friend.

“In the face of Damini’s intense grief, all our treatment failed,” said Dr Utkarsh Shukla, the zoo vet.

Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies

Mike Lovett/Brandeis University

Alex, a 31-year-old African gray parrot, knew more than 100 words and could count and recognize colors and shapes.

…Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Dr. Pepperberg said, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, and was determined to have died late Thursday night.