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...

That's really a useful finding that helps to connect the dots in the rapidly changing overall ecosystem of biosphere on Earth. I thought this pattern of diminishing social groups is specific to humans. But as usual, the phenomenon appears broader and more generic.

Education, jobs, desire for better living conditions did the damage for humans. Families became workers of the economies and were flung far apart.

For elephants, their distress is probably a direct result of their need for social grouping. A wild cat wouldn't have been affected by the lack of social groups.

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

Thought this was a joke about Mastodon at first ;D

It must be due to their social media, AI, and porn usage

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

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

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.

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