YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Elephants found to be increasingly isolated leading to fractured social networks

80 points gmays 2 hours ago 15 comments

slopinthebag 2 hours ago | parent

imagine we find out later that shifts in our socialisation isn't due to smartphones but some unknown factor that also affects intelligent animals...

blobbers 1 hour ago | parent

Or imagine we find out later that shifts in our radio waves are also affecting intelligent animals!

(like bees?)

yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent

hmmm check the mycelium

stouset 1 hour ago | parent

The elephants are spending too much time confiding in Claude?

lelandfe 1 hour ago | parent

Even bigger tusks, Claude

mso3i 1 hour ago | parent

Well there are more microbes around us than there are stars in the universe. They survive without smart phones, intelligence, religion, society and stories that need to fit in a 3 inch chimp brain about the meaning of it all. One of them recently killed 6 million people. Life goes on.

AnneTrotter 23 minutes ago | parent

What a comforting thought, that killing off an intelligent species isn't really our fault.

Bit of an escapist fantasy, though.

K0balt 1 hour ago | parent

YC 26. Facebook, but for elephants. (Maybe pivot to doordash for lions?)

cyberax 11 minutes ago | parent

> Facebook, but for elephants.

Tuskbook?

> Maybe pivot to doordash for lions?

Rate your delivery driver on the score from "Too thin, won't eat again" to "Nice and juicy".

Avicebron 1 hour ago | parent

It's like when you starve them of resources they don't thrive. It does not compute, the line is going up.

nan60 1 hour ago | parent

Thought this was a joke about Mastodon at first ;D

xmcp123 1 hour ago | parent

Glad to see things like this are being funded. It’s easy to forget we aren’t the only smart, social creatures on the planet dealing with this rapidly changing world.

Hat tip to the elephants for not being sociopaths like the Orca. Or otters.

Maybe the elephants and octopus should form a brilliant animals but not sociopaths club.

AnneTrotter 22 minutes ago | parent

Elephants are a reminder of what we should choose to be. Orcas are what we deserve for what we have already chosen.

dieselgate 1 hour ago | parent

Read it a few times to understand the core message because the thesis and title are slightly self-evident i.e. more isolation causes less socializing. But the crux seems to be:

> "We see individual elephants leaving and possibly dying at accelerating rates, but new individuals are not coming into the population,” said Madsen. “With fewer individuals in the population, those who are left will naturally have fewer relationships. However, the remaining elephants are also changing their relationships with each other."

In my opinion "dying at accelerating rates" is the/a key takeaway. Notably climate change doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned and hate to see poaching be a direct cause:

> Many elephant populations are already impacted through deaths resulting from poaching and conflicts with humans. Other contributing factors may be disruptions in habitat connectivity and less food available...

Other comments mention other intelligent and social species and this reminds me of Puget Sound Southern resident killer whales [0] and their decrease in food availability and offspring viability.

[0]: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-s...

_joel 1 hour ago | parent

They still can't handle the svn to git migration as they lost TRUNK