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Interesting fact: there’s actually a specific phenomenon in modern-day elephants that explains the idea of males being more reckless. Modern elephant males peri
by openasocket 6y ago
Interesting fact: there’s actually a specific phenomenon in modern-day elephants that explains the idea of males being more reckless. Modern elephant males periodically go through a process called musth . It’s sort of like the male version of going into heat. Their testosterone goes up like 60x and they become aggressive and even violent. They’ll even attack humans and other animals with little warning. A guide at Kruger national park in South Africa mentioned that they once had a spree of young bull elephants going into musth and attacking and breaking the spines of rhinoceros. I imagine if mammoths also went through musth they wouldn’t be particularly cautious about terrain hazards and the like
- celrod 6y agoThey all died, male and female alike, but a higher percent of the males left behind fossils. Meaning getting yourself killed is only part of the equation. The other part is that the manner in which you get yourself killed has to increase the odds of fossilization. Maybe an elephant in musth chasing rhinos pays less attention to where it's going and accidentally get itself trapped in a tar pit.
- trianglem 6y agoThe females probably all died together in a group and are less dispersed so are harder to find. Obvious conjecture.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoCould also have something to do with age at time of death and bone composition.
- barkingcat 6y agoOr there are biochemical processes that prefer preservation of male specimens, for example the prehistoric version of male hormones acting as a preservative, or perhaps the prehistoric version of the female horomone acting as a cue for insects or decomposers in the ecosystem to consume the carcass etc.
- IgorPartola 6y agoBigger bones with higher calcium content? Or higher ratio of calcium to something else? But I can also totally buy that it’s mostly a function of where they die. Like dying in a bog might preserve the bones differently than dying in a forest or by a lake or whatever.
- Gibbon1 6y agoWomen probably more likely to die in childbirth or with a group of family members and end up being properly buried. I think most soils aren't conductive to preservation. Thus anyone given proper funeral rites wont end up as a fossil.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dmix 6y agoMammoths and Mastodons seem like even more dangerous elephants (especially aesthetically with their giant horns). So I wouldn't be surprised they acted similarly. Maybe that sort of thing played a role in various big game species extinction in many places. They seemed scarier, and/or actually were more aggressive during certain phases like Musking.
- pc86 6y agoIs musth correlated with reproduction the way heat is, or is it something else?
- openasocket 6y agoI’m actually not sure. Based on the Wikipedia page, bulls in musth emit a characteristic low-pitched tone that females in heat seem to respond to. And the testosterone levels wouldn’t hurt sperm production. I don’t know much beyond the Wikipedia page and some information I learned from some guides, but it sounds like the exact evolutionary advantage/purpose isn’t well understood. It’s interesting that the females also go into heat. The musth certainly seems like the male analogue of heat. And the male aggression is certainly similar to what you see in some other herd animals during mating season (aka rutting, though I don’t know enough to be able to compare the aggression levels of musth with that of a rutting deer or bison). Elephants in musth will fight other elephants, and unlike normal mating dominance fights they will try to really kill the other. Part of me wonders if this is a part of natural selection. A grown bull elephant doesn’t really have any predators, except another bull elephant in musth. Another interesting fact about musth is it seems to effect elephant society. When young males reach adulthood and leave the herd of females, they tend to form small “bachelor herds” consisting of a few other young males and an older male, who “shows them the ropes”. And one of the things the older male teaches them is self control during musth. The Wikipedia article, and a story a guide told me, mention that young males in musth without an older male presence to help guide them (teach them?) will be more aggressive.
- voldacar 6y agoAll creatures die regardless of how reckless they were when they were alive the question is why males seem to become fossilized more often than females. Uneven distributions of recklessness while alive are irrelevant
- contingencies 6y agoWiktionary etymology: Persian مست (mast, “drunk, inebriated”).
- 1MachineElf 6y agoPerhaps the connection with the article here is that young bodies fossilize better, and more males died young.