Movement reveals reproductive tactics in male elephants

1. Long-term bio-logging has the potential to reveal how movements, and hence life history trade-offs, vary over a lifetime. Reproductive tactics in particular may vary as individuals’ trade-off current investment versus lifetime fitness. Male African savannah elephants (Loxodona africana) provide a telling example of balancing body growth with reproductive fitness due to the combination of indeterminate growth and strongly delineated periods of sexual activity (musth), which results in reproductive tactics that alter with age. 2. Our study aims to quantify the extent to which male elephants alter their movement patterns, and hence energetic allocation, in relation to (i) reproductive state and (ii) age, and (iii) to determine if musth periods can be detected directly from GPS tracking data. 3. We used a combination of GPS tracking data and visual observations of 25 male elephants ranging in age from 20-52 years to examine the influence of reproductive state and age on movement. We then...