The “aha” moment or the sudden arrival of the solution to a problem is a common human experience. Spontaneous problem solving without evident trial and error behavior in humans and other animals has been referred to as insight. Surprisingly, elephants, thought to be highly intelligent, have failed to exhibit insightful problem solving in previous cognitive studies. We tested whether three Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) would use sticks or other objects to obtain food items placed out-of-reach and overhead. Without prior trial and error behavior, a 7-year-old male Asian elephant showed spontaneous problem solving by moving a large plastic cube, on which he then stood, to acquire the food. In further testing he showed behavioral flexibility, using this technique to reach other items and retrieving the cube from various locations to use as a tool to acquire food. In the cube's absence, he generalized this tool utilization technique to other objects and, when given smaller objects, stacked them in an attempt to reach the food. The elephant's overall behavior was consistent with the definition of insightful problem solving. Previous failures to demonstrate this ability in elephants may have resulted not from a lack of cognitive ability but from the presentation of tasks requiring trunk-held sticks as potential tools, thereby interfering with the trunk's use as a sensory organ to locate the targeted food.

Animals in aggregations such as herds, schools, flocks, or colonies tend to synchronize their behaviour with each other for food acquisition and predator detection. Different species of captive penguins, when housed communally, intermingle more than in their natural habitat. Wild penguins typically divide themselves into separate colonies by species. We predicted that penguins would synchronize their behaviour more with conspecifics rather than interspecifically in a mixedspecies zoo exhibit. The subjects were 65 penguins of two different species, chinstrap (Pygoscelis antarctica) and gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) in the Central Park Zoo, New York, NY, USA. Using instantaneous scan sampling, 359 video scans were taken over 10 days. Scans were analysed for nine different categories of behaviour for both species. Intra-species synchrony scores were calculated using the Kappa coefficient of agreement, and inter-species synchrony was measured by computing cross-correlations. As predicted, overall synchrony was significantly greater within both species of penguins than for randomly aggregated data representing mixed groups. There was also significantly less synchrony between species than between randomly mixed data for six of the nine behaviour categories. The pattern of results indicates that the penguins had organized by behaviour into separate species-specific colonies within the enclosure. They maintained species separation through behavioural synchrony despite the restrictions imposed by captivity.

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