29 Sept 2023
Visual feedback plays key role in helping world’s largest land animal maintain consistency in its stride and movement, according to new study.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
Image courtesy ElLude / Pixabay
Elephants’ sight is vital to them maintaining consistency in stride and movement, according to research led by a team at the RVC.
Visual feedback is crucial to the world’s largest land animal, integral to its mobility. While seemingly obvious, researchers wanted to study the extent of good eyesight due to elephants’ ability to move around comfortably at night.
They found general variability of an elephant’s stride worsened over time when sight was impaired, with vision important in controlling, correcting and maintaining a consistent stride.
Elephants are different to most four-legged animals as they maintain the same sideways sequence footfall pattern across all speeds – most likely to help them remain stable.
Important for relatively slow animals, it suggests elephants rely on sensory feedback to control foot placement and sequencing, but the team wanted to determine the importance of the visual feedback and how the nervous system integrated information for a stable gait.
Professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the RVC John Hutchinson led the team, which also featured Max Kurz of Boys Town National Research Hospital, Nebraska, US.
They worked with four trained adult Asian elephants that were comfortable wearing a blindfold when led by another friendly elephant. The elephants then walked with and without a blindfold on, across a flat trackway with a GPS device attached to their torso and an accelerometer attached to their hindfoot.
The blindfolded elephants displayed inconsistency in their stride over time, with the findings suggesting that vision was crucial in controlling how they walk. The research was published in the journal Biology Letters.
Prof Hutchinson said: “Our research confirms that vision is important for controlling the stride-to-stride variability of elephant motions. This is important because it shows how the largest land animal relies on vision to control its motion, and presumably its stability.
“Giant land animals must avoid dangerous falls or stumbles, more so than smaller animals must, so visual feedback appears to be very important to elephants in this regard.
“This knowledge gained will be helpful in informing the care of elephants in captivity, for example, dealing with vision problems or lameness.”
