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Elephants have four distinct personalities that help their herd survive in the African bush, scientists have found. With their grey skin, mournful eyes and slow plodding gait, you could be forgiven for thinking elephants are uniformly melancholy creatures. But scientists have now discovered the largest living land animals have personalities to match their size. In a new study of African elephants, researchers have identified four distinct characters that are prevalent with a herd – the leaders, the gentle giants, the playful rogues and the reliable plodders. Each of the types has developed to help the giant mammals survive in their harsh environment and are almost unique in the animal kingdom, according to the scientists. Professor Phyllis Lee and her colleague Cynthia Moss studied a herd of elephants in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya known as the EB family – famous for their matriarch Echo before she died in 2009. Using data collected over 38 years of watching this group, the researchers analysed them for 26 types of behaviour and found four personality traits tended to come to the fore. The strongest personality to emerge was that of the leader. Unlike other animals, where leadership tends to be won by the most dominant and aggressive individual, the elephants instead respected intelligence and problem solving in their leader. Echo, the matriarch and oldest in the group, her daughter Enid, and Ella, the second oldest female, all emerged as leaders. | 
