Musth Explained

Musth or must (from Persian,) is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants characterized by aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones. It has been known in Asian elephants for 3000 years but was only described in African elephants in 1981. There is evidence that similar behaviour occurred in extinct proboscideans like gomphotheres and mastodons. Elephants often discharge a thick, tar-like secretion called temporin from the temporal gland during musth. Behavioral management for captive bull elephants in musth includes physical restraint and a starvation diet for several days to a week.

Etymology

Musth comes from an Urdu term for intoxication; in Persian it means .^[1]

Biology

Musth has been known in Asian elephants for 3000 years (described in the Rigveda 1500–1000 B.C.) but was recognized in African elephants only in the late twentieth century.^[2]

In 1975, scientists Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss were working in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Poole noticed a period of heightened reproductive activity and aggression in male African elephants. She began documenting and describing the physical and behavioral characteristics and temporal (time-related) dynamics among individual males. This led to scientifically identifying musth in African elephants.^[3] Musth is also suggested to have occurred in mammoths, given the testosterone histories from their tusks.^[4] Musth-like behaviour is also suggested to have occurred in South American gomphotheres^[5] and North American mastodons.^[6]

Musth differs from rut in that musth most often takes place in winter, whereas the female elephant's estrus cycle is not seasonally linked.^[7]

Physical characteristics

Elephants in musth often discharge a thick tar-like secretion called temporin from the temporal gland located on the temporal sides of the head. Temporin contains proteins, lipids (including cholesterol), phenol and 4-methyl phenol,^{[8] [9]} cresols and sesquiterpenes (notably farnesol and its derivatives). Secretions and urine collected from zoo elephants have been shown to contain elevated levels of various highly odorous ketones and aldehydes.

Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal).^[10]

Behavioral characteristics

Musth is believed to be linked to sexual arousal or establishing dominance, Wild bulls in musth often produce a characteristic low, pulsating rumbling noise known as "musth rumble" which other elephants can hear from miles away. The rumble has been shown to prompt not only attraction in the form of reply vocalizations from cows in heat, but also silent avoidance behavior from other bulls, particularly juveniles and non-receptive females, suggesting an evolutionary benefit to advertising the musth state.^{[11] [12]}

A bull elephant in musth, wild or otherwise, is extremely dangerous to humans, other elephants, and other species. Bull elephants in musth have killed keepers/mahouts, as well as other bull elephants, female elephants, and calves (the last usually inadvertently or accidentally in what is often called "herd infighting").^[13]

Between 1991-2001, young bull rogue elephants killed 63 rhinos of both genders (58 endangered white rhinos and 5 rare black rhinos) in two South African national parks (Hluhluwe–Imfolozi and Pilanesberg). This was ultimately attributed to an aberrant form of musth. After being rebuffed by older female elephants, they went after rhinos, killing them after raping some. Three young elephant bulls were shot which temporarily ended the killings.^[14] Some scientists opined this was an example of young male elephants permanently changed by the trauma of witnessing their breeding herds culled due to overcrowding in other South African parks. These young bulls had been spared themselves due to their age and size although herd culls are properly done in entirety, i.e. leaving no survivors to suffer the equivalents of PTSD, survivor guilt, and other disorders or traumas later in life which can then create or exacerbate human-elephant conflicts or other forms of violence, according to Ron Thomson, a late 20th-century Zimbabwe game warden and Parks Board veteran.^{[15] [16] [17] [18] [19]}

In the absence of older males whose presence inhibits musth in smaller younger bulls, these adolescent bulls had reached puberty (musth) prematurely which they could not control,^[20] resulting in the "warped behavior of animals who have lost their elders, and who are now flailing in a diminished, disarranged world." It is established that functionally important decision-making abilities may be significantly altered by disruption of the natural structure of kin-based social relationships and that violent disruption "appears capable of driving aberrant behaviours in social animals that are akin to the post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by humans following extremely traumatic events" due to the pachyderms' intelligence, strong emotional family attachments, and prodigious memories.^{[21] [22] [23] [24]}

Another interrelated but more generalized theory of why the young elephants went wild was that, owing to culls and herd fragmentation, there were no older elephants to teach and discipline them.^[25]

South African ecologist and ranger Gus van Dyk, who thought of the idea of reintroducing older males into Pilanesberg to prevent younger males from entering musth, noted that no further rhinoceros killings were observed.^{[26] [27]}

Management

In Sri Lanka and India, domesticated Asian elephants in musth are traditionally tied to a strong tree and denied food and water or put on a starvation diet from several days to a week which shortens the duration of the musth, typically to five to eight days. Sedatives, like xylazine, are also sometimes used.^{[28] [29]} Zoos keeping adult male elephants need strong, purpose-built enclosures to isolate males during their musth.

In popular culture

• Valmiki, in Sundara Kanda of the Ramayana (7th to 4th centuries BCE), made reference to the Mahendra mountain shedding water like an elephant's rut juice upon being pressed by Hanuman.^[30]
• In the Matanga Lila (300 BCE to 300 CE) musth is described with "Excitement, swiftness, odor, love passion, complete florescence of the body, wrath, prowess, and fearlessness are declared to be the eight excellences of musth.".
• Sangam poetry (300 BCE to 300 CE) describes musth. Kummatoor Kannanaar in Pathitrupatthu 12 describes it as follows:

• References to elephants in musth (whose temporin secretion is often referred to as "ichor") are for example in the Raghuvaṃśa (4th–5th century CE), wher Kalidasa wrote that the king's elephants drip ichor in seven streams to match the scent put forth by the seven-leaved 'sapta-cchada' (= "seven-leaf") tree (perhaps Alstonia scholaris).

• In Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), Phileas Fogg buys an elephant which was being fed sugar and butter so it would go into musth for combat purposes; however, the animal had been on this regimen only for a relatively short time so the condition has not yet presented.
• Shooting an Elephant is an autobiographical account by George Orwell written in 1936, in which he describes how an elephant in Burma had an attack of musth and killed an Indian, which in turn led to the shooting of the elephant.
• In his James Bond novel The Man With the Golden Gun (1965), Ian Fleming wrote that the villain Francisco Scaramanga was driven to become a cold-blooded assassin after authorities shot an elephant that he had ridden in his circus act because the elephant went on a rampage while in musth.
• The Tamil movie Kumki (2012), which revolves around a mahout and his trained elephant, shows the elephant in musth towards the climax. Captive elephants are either trained for duties in temples and cultural festivals or trained as a kumki elephant which confronts wild elephants and prevents them from entering villages. Elephants trained for temple duties are of a gentle nature and cannot face wild elephants. In this movie, a tribal village wants to hire a kumki elephant to chase away wild elephants which enter the village every harvest season. The mahout, who needs money, takes his temple-trained elephant to do this job, in the vain hope that wild elephants will not come in. But wild elephants start attacking the village on the harvest day. The temple-trained elephant enters musth and thus fights with the wild elephants, kills the most notorious among the herd but dies from injuries sustained during the fight.^{[31] [32]}

External links

• Musth of the elephant bulls
• Transport and Maintenance of Musth in Elephants

Notes and References

1. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus: American edition, published 1996 by Oxford University Press; p. 984
2. Book: Sukumar, R . The living elephants: evolutionary ecology, behavior, and conservation . 2003 . Oxford University Press. USA. 9780195107784 . registration . temporin elephant. . 2010-12-25.
3. Poole . Joyce H. . Moss . Cynthia J. . August 1981 . Musth in the African elephant, Loxodonta africana . Nature . en . 292 . 5826 . 830–831 . 10.1038/292830a0 . 7266649 . 1981Natur.292..830P . 4337060 . 1476-4687.
4. Cherney . Michael D. . Fisher . Daniel C. . Auchus . Richard J. . Rountrey . Adam N. . Selcer . Perrin . Shirley . Ethan A. . Beld . Scott G. . Buigues . Bernard . Mol . Dick . Boeskorov . Gennady G. . Vartanyan . Sergey L. . Tikhonov . Alexei N. . 2023-05-18 . Testosterone histories from tusks reveal woolly mammoth musth episodes . Nature . en . 617 . 7961 . 533–539 . 10.1038/s41586-023-06020-9 . 37138076 . 2023Natur.617..533C . 258485513 . 0028-0836.
5. El Adli . Joseph J. . Fisher . Daniel C. . Cherney . Michael D. . Labarca . Rafael . Lacombat . Frédéric . July 2017 . First analysis of life history and season of death of a South American gomphothere . Quaternary International . en . 443 . 180–188 . 10.1016/j.quaint.2017.03.016. 2017QuInt.443..180E .
6. Miller . Joshua H. . Fisher . Daniel C. . Crowley . Brooke E. . Secord . Ross . Konomi . Bledar A. . 2022-06-21 . Male mastodon landscape use changed with maturation (late Pleistocene, North America) . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . en . 119 . 25 . e2118329119 . 10.1073/pnas.2118329119 . free . 0027-8424 . 9231495 . 35696566. 2022PNAS..11918329M .
7. Web site: Musth of the elephant bulls – Upali.ch. 9 November 2016.
8. Physiological Correlates of Musth: Lipid Metabolites and Chemical Composition of Exudates. L.E.L Rasmussen and Thomas E Perrin, Physiology & Behavior, October 1999, Volume 67, Issue 4, pp. 539–549,
9. Musth in elephants. Deepa Ananth, Zoo's print journal, 15(5), pages 259–262 (article)
10. Rasmussen . Lois E. . Buss . Irven O. . Hess . David L. . Schmidt . Michael B. . Testosterone and Dihydrotestosterone Concentrations in Elephant Serum and Temporal Gland Secretions . Biology of Reproduction . 1 March 1984 . 30 . 2 . 352–362 . 10.1095/biolreprod30.2.352 . 6704470 . free .
11. Rob Slotow, Dave Balfour, and Owen Howison."Killing of black and white rhinoceroses by African elephants in Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park, South Africa", Pachyderm 31 (July–December, 2001):14–20. Accessed 14 September 2007.
12. Web site: Siebert . Charles . 2006-10-08 . An Elephant Crackup? . 2007-06-16 . New York Times Magazine.
13. News: 2010-04-28 . Elephant kills 12 females over spurned advances . 2024-04-12 . ABC News . en-AU.
14. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19941023/1937416/a-murder-mystery-why-were-elephants-slaughtering-rhinos----lack-of-adult-role-models-gets-the-blame A Murder Mystery: Why Were Elephants Slaughtering Rhinos?
15. https://africageographic.com/stories/kruger-cull-88-elephants-says-hunter-ron-thomson/ Kruger should cull 88% of its elephants, says hunter Ron Thomson
16. https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-9994-10-62#:~:text=However%2C%20extremely%20disruptive%20events%2C%20including,individual's%20close%20social%20bonds%20and Effects of social disruption in elephants persist decades after culling
17. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html "An Elephant Crackup?"
18. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/elephants-never-forget-when-you-slaughter-their-family-180947583/ "Elephants Never Forget When You Slaughter Their Family"
19. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-delinquents/ "60 Minutes II: The Delinquents"
20. News: June 1996 . The Dangers of Elephant Relocation . 2023-12-05 . The New Republic . 569 . 381 . 6583 . 10.1038/381569b0 . 0028-6583.
21. https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-9994-10-62#:~:text=However%2C%20extremely%20disruptive%20events%2C%20including,individual's%20close%20social%20bonds%20and Effects of social disruption in elephants persist decades after culling
22. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html "An Elephant Crackup?"
23. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/elephants-never-forget-when-you-slaughter-their-family-180947583/ "Elephants Never Forget When You Slaughter Their Family"
24. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-delinquents/ "60 Minutes II: The Delinquents"
25. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/16/251672253/why-we-need-grandpas-and-grandmas-part-1#:~:text=The%20New%20York%20Times%20reported,on%20people%20in%20safari%20vehicles.%22 "Why we need grandpas and grandmas, part I
26. Bruce Page, Joyce Poole, Adam Klocke, Gus van Dyk, and Rob Slotow. "Older Bull Elephants Control Young Males" Nature 408 (23 November 2000). Accessed 19 July 2019.
27. News: Teenage elephants need a father figure . December 5, 2023 . BBC.
28. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274501896_Musth_in_Elephants Musth in Elephants
29. Parag Nigam, Samir Sinha, Pradeep Malik, and Sushant Chowdhary MANAGING ELEPHANT IN MUSTH: A CASE REPORT, Zoos' Print Journal 21(5): 2265-2266 (May 2006).
30. Web site: Ramayana. Valmiki. August 2008. Sundara kaanda reference to Musth. 22 May 2021. valmikiramayan.net.
31. News: Vikram Prabhu: Kumki climax is the same . The Times of India . 2020-03-25.
32. News: Kumki: Close encounters . The Hindu . Malathi . Rangarajan . 15 December 2012 . 2 November 2017.