By having an experienced, older female lead the core group, individual elephants in the social group gain significant benefits and social knowledge (McComb et al., 2001). With age, female elephants are able to refine their skills and become a source of social knowledge to other females. For example, matriarchs possess enhanced discriminatory ability, which not only translates into reproductive benefit for her, but it influences the social knowledge of the group as a whole. Matriarchs can correctly discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar elephant calls (McComb et al., 2001). This discriminatory ability allows the matriarch to assess her environment and to allocate her time and energy between foraging and vigilant behavior accordingly.
Old age also means that matriarchs have more experience with predatory threat. They are able to make appropriate decisions about the threat level and respond accordingly. One study demonstrated that age greatly influences the ability of matriarchs to make ecologically relevant decisions in terms of assessing predatory threat. Elephant social groups with younger matriarchs tended to under-react to the presence of male lions, whereas older matriarchs recognized the serious danger that the lions presented, and altered their behavior (McComb et al., 2011). Other studies have shown that the survival of calves in a group led my older matriarchs is greater than one led by a younger matriarch during drought season. Older matriarchs can use their knowledge of location of resources from their past experiences with drought and lead their family to forage in areas outside of their usual range to find food (Foley et al., 2008).
It is clear that matriarchs play a vital role in the lives of her core group members. These skills that matriarchs have accumulated over time, gives the matriarch and her core group a biological fitness benefit and a higher reproductive success (McComb et al., 2001).