Wild African savannah elephants in two South African parks used 41 distinct gesture types, built from 32 gesture actions, to push rivals away or make them stop what they were doing. The catalog, drawn from more than 90 hours of video and about 840 gestures, comes from encounters at Addo Elephant National Park and Marakele National Park.
Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna led the work, with Angela Stoeger as corresponding author, and it appeared in the journal Animal Cognition on 25 September 2026. The central question was whether the signals are deliberate, and the answer rests on four tests borrowed from primate research.
Forty-one gesture types from 32 actions
The Animal Cognition paper, titled “Elephant gestural communication during agonistic interactions: repertoire, intentionality, and goals,” reports about 59 hours of video from Marakele and about 32 hours from Addo. Marakele covers roughly 67,000 hectares in Limpopo Province and Addo roughly 162,000 hectares in the Eastern Cape. Observation lasted about one month at Addo and three months at Marakele, according to Earth.com’s account of the study.
The word agonistic covers competitive encounters, such as a bull displacing another from a waterhole or one animal crowding a rival off a patch of reeds, and every gesture in the catalog was recorded in that setting. Only gestures with a clear response survived into the 41-type list, and rare movements were dropped. Examples include flinging the trunk, spreading the ears, lunging forward, pushing, touching and hitting. About 47 percent of the gestures involved the trunk and about 37 percent the ears. The animals are African bush elephants, a species listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2021 after its global population fell by more than 50 percent over three generations. Their herds are built around related females led by a matriarch, while adult bulls often live alone or in small bachelor groups, so conflicts over resources involve animals of very different size and standing: mature bulls average about 6 tonnes and mature cows about 3.
Audience checking, waiting and persistence
Four markers of intentional signaling were tested: audience checking, sensitivity to the recipient’s attention, response waiting and persistence. Elephants looked at the recipient before 97 percent of gestures and during 98 percent. They paused after 90 percent of gesture bouts, as though waiting for a reaction, and they kept gesturing in 83 percent of bouts in which the apparent goal had not yet been met.
The gestures served two main goals, which the authors label “Move away” and “Stop behaviour.” Successful gestures made the other elephant move away in 80 percent of cases and stop its activity in the other 20 percent. Flexibility showed in the repertoire itself: 21 of the 33 frequently used gesture types served both goals. When the recipient was not looking, the elephants leaned on more audible or tactile signals and fewer visual ones, though that pattern was less certain for individually identified animals.
Parks that share 63 percent of the vocabulary
The two populations shared 63 percent of gesture types, and they differed in which gestures they favored and what they competed over. Conflicts at Addo centered on water at artificial waterholes, while at Marakele they centered on reeds. The paper does not prove that water scarcity caused Addo’s higher conflict rate. Lucy Bates of the University of Portsmouth, a co-author, called the identification of so many gesture types really exciting, and Eleuteri noted that elephants and primates are evolutionarily distant, which suggests sophisticated gestural communication can evolve independently in species with advanced intelligence.
A repertoire built on earlier semi-captive tests
The wild-herd catalog follows an experiment with semi-captive elephants. In Royal Society Open Science in July 2025, Eleuteri, Bates, Yvonne Nyaradzo Masarira, Joshua Plotnik, Catherine Hobaiter and Stoeger reported 38 gesture types that elephants used mostly when an experimenter was visually attentive, with more persistence when a goal was only partly met and more variation when it went unmet. The Austrian Academy of Sciences’ elephant multimodal communication project, run by Stoeger and Eleuteri, continues the work on how vocal calls and gestures combine, with collaborators including Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, Bates at Portsmouth and Sam Ferreira of South African National Parks. The 2025 experiment tested three of the same markers in a controlled setting, signaling to an attentive audience, persisting until a goal is met and changing signals after failure, which means the wild data now repeat in the field a pattern first shown with semi-captive animals.
Eleuteri and colleagues set limits on what the 41 types represent. Only competitive encounters were studied, so the list does not cover all elephant communication, and some subtle signals may have occurred before filming began.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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