It’s a jungle out there — and a desert, an ocean and a savanna, too. So it helps to know your enemies. While many animals can tell friend from foe, relatively few have been shown to be able to distinguish among predator species based on the type of threat they represent. A potentially even more useful ability would be to be able to tell which of several groups of a single predator species are the ones to worry about.

African elephants, it turns out, have this ability. Lucy A. Bates and Richard W. Byrne of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and colleagues have demonstrated that using odor and visual cues elephants are able to classify subgroups within a predator species. The species in question? Homo sapiens.

Image Credit... Chris Gash

In a report in Current Biology, the researchers describe their experiments in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Elephants in the region encounter different ethnic groups, including the Maasai, whose young men spear elephants, and the Kamba, agricultural villagers who pose no threat at all.