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Elephants have four distinct personalities that help their herd survive in the African bush, scientists have found.

With their grey skin, mournful eyes and slow plodding gait, you could be forgiven for thinking elephants are uniformly melancholy creatures. But scientists have now discovered the largest living land animals have personalities to match their size.

In a new study of African elephants, researchers have identified four distinct characters that are prevalent with a herd – the leaders, the gentle giants, the playful rogues and the reliable plodders.

Each of the types has developed to help the giant mammals survive in their harsh environment and are almost unique in the animal kingdom, according to the scientists.

Professor Phyllis Lee and her colleague Cynthia Moss studied a herd of elephants in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya known as the EB family – famous for their matriarch Echo before she died in 2009.

Using data collected over 38 years of watching this group, the researchers analysed them for 26 types of behaviour and found four personality traits tended to come to the fore.

The strongest personality to emerge was that of the leader. Unlike other animals, where leadership tends to be won by the most dominant and aggressive individual, the elephants instead respected intelligence and problem solving in their leader. Echo, the matriarch and oldest in the group, her daughter Enid, and Ella, the second oldest female, all emerged as leaders.

The playful elephants tended to be younger but were more curious and active. Eudora, a 40-year-old female in the herd, seemed to be the most playful, consistently showing this trait through out her life while playfulness in some of the other elephants declined with age.

Gentle elephants, which included two 27-year-old females Eleanor and Eliot, caressed and rubbed against others more than the others.

Those that were reliable tended to be those that were most consistent at making good decisions, helped to care for infants in the herd and were calm when faced with threats. Echo and her youngest daughter Ebony seemed to be the most reliable.

Professor Lee said that elephants with these traits tended to be the most socially integrated in the group while those who tended to be less reliable and pushy were more likely to split from the herd.

(Read by CJ Henderson. CJ Henderson is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)