Body temperature daily rhythm adaptations in African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana)

The savanna elephant is the largest extant mammal and often inhabits hot and and environments. Due to their large size, it might be expected that elephants have particular physiological adaptations, such as adjustments to the rhythms of their core body temperature (T-b) to deal with environmental challenges. This study describes for the first time the T-b daily rhythms in savanna elephants. Our results showed that elephants had lower mean T-b values (36.2 +/- 0.49 degrees C) than smaller ungulates inhabiting similar environments but did not have larger or smaller amplitudes of T-b variation (0.40 +/- 0.12 degrees C), as would be predicted by their exposure to large fluctuations in ambient temperature or their large size. No difference was found between the daily T-b rhythms measured under different conditions of water stress. Peak T-b's occurred late in the evening (22: 10) which is generally later than in other large mammals ranging in similar environmental conditions. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The story of some: Everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults

The statement, some elephants have trunks, is logically true but pragmatically infelicitous. Whilst some is logically consistent with all, it is often pragmatically interpreted as precluding all. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that with pragmatically impoverished materials, sensitivity to the pragmatic implicature associated with some is apparent earlier in development than has previously been found. Amongst 8-year-old children, we observed much greater sensitivity to the implicature in pragmatically enriched contexts. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that amongst adults, logical responses to infelicitous some statements take longer to produce than do logical responses to felicitous some statements, and that working memory capacity predicts the tendency to give logical responses to the former kind of statement. These results suggest that some adults develop the ability to inhibit a pragmatic response in favour of a logical answer. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of pragmatic inference.