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Not so long ago, the planet was full of elephants: big, small, hairy… Their history is full of loss, but also amazement and mystery, something that the American Museum of Natural History in New York wants to do justice with. his new exhibition, The Secret World of Elephants.
“My count is between 15 and 17 species of elephants and their relatives that existed all over the planet in the last billion years. And now we are down to three. What happened?” asks exhibit curator Ross MacPhee. .
MacPhee, who wears a spectacular white shirt printed with blue drawings of elephants (“It comes with the job,” he jokes), hopes that by learning more about these animals, people will get involved and look for ways to contribute to their preservation.
Above all, he would like attendees to “make a connection with anything made from ivory and realize that there are alternatives that don’t involve killing elephants.”
If a family has objects of this type, he says, it is better not to sell them, because that only serves to encourage trade.
According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), “behind every piece of ivory – whether a whole tusk or a carved bead – there is a dead elephant.” It is estimated that poaching kills around 20,000 elephants each year for their tusks alone.
“🐘 Did you know that elephants can “hear” with their legs? Or that they have 40,000 muscles in their trunk? What you ~don’t~ know about these charismatic giants might surprise you! Discover 6 curious facts: “writes the Museum in a message on social networks about the new exhibition.
🐘 Did you know that elephants can “hear” with their feet? Or that they have 40,000 muscles in their trunks? What you ~don’t~ know about these charismatic giants might surprise you! Discover 6 fun facts: pic.twitter.com/eul0OfT4qf
— American Museum of Natural History (@AMNH) November 4, 2023
A matriarchal society
Another initiative that the exhibition organizers hope to give visibility to is the Reteti elephant sanctuary, in Kenya, which is managed by women from the local community and seeks to reintegrate orphaned or abandoned calves into the wild.
In a corner of the exhibition, a video tells the history of the place and its inhabitants.
It is no coincidence that the sanctuary is run by women: elephants live in matriarchal communities, where a female, usually elderly, leads the herd.
It is one of the many curiosities about these animals that arouse people’s fascination. Although there is still much more to discover.
MacPhee points, in particular, to two new fields: studies of the minds of elephants and their way of communicating.
“We know that they can greet each other by rolling their trunks, but how do they know that this particular individual is someone in their group or someone they haven’t seen in a while?” the expert asks. “How do they remember where the water is?”
In the exhibition, a mirror questions viewers about their sense of “self.” For humans, self-awareness develops around two years of age, but the same does not happen for most mammals.
An experiment carried out in New York in 2006 suggests that elephants, however, are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, which raises questions about their sense of identity and their relationships with other individuals.
Sicilian dwarf elephants
But if there is something that stands out above all the objects in the exhibition, it is the life-size models of a pair of dwarf elephants, now extinct, that lived on the island of Sicily hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The baby, little bigger than a bulldog, hairy and without fangs, fascinates students from New York schools, who take the opportunity to explore the exhibition before its official opening to the public, next Monday, November 13.
A few steps away, a huge model of an African elephant (one of only three surviving species of elephant, along with the Asian and the forest elephant) shows a skeleton projected onto its soft gray skin.
“The advantage we have (at the museum),” MacPhee says, “is that the visitor, unlike on television, can see things in three dimensions and experience what we are trying to teach them.”
He is proven right by the three piles of (plastic) excrement in the center of the room, which can be opened to reveal the hidden world of fungi and insects they house. With ecstatic faces that barely hide laughter, children line up to touch them.
2023-11-08 21:17:00
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