As part of our long-term analysis, we were uniquely able to follow the fate of a number of males - 155 to be precise- who were born into our known families and who survived to adulthood. These young males provided us with fascinating insights into how males initiate independence from their mothers and other family females, how they form long-lasting relationships with other males, and how they use the knowledge of elder bulls for survival.

 
 Young males are the focus of more aggression from family females than are the young family females. Despite heightened aggressive rates, males appear to make very individual decisions about when they are ready to strike out on their own. Some males take several years; others seem to go in the space of a few days.  During our study, males left at the average age of 14 years, although some left as young as 8 and others as old are 18. This form of "natal dispersal" is seen in almost all mammals and birds, and serves the function of ensuring that family members don't often mate with each other. Even after dispersal, males return to greet and occasionally associate wit their families, ensuring long-term recognition, again assisting in the avoidance of kin-matings.

As males age, they tend to spend less and less time with females. By the age of 30 (when they begin to come into the annual reproductive state of musth) they are spending only 40% of time with females, and 40% of their time with other males. They are surprisingly seldom "solitary". Young and even older males are highly sociable, interacting with other males, and even regularly playing with them.  These male-male friendships appeared to persist well into reproductive ages, and we also found that top associates - friends- tend not to come into musth at the same time. This avoidance of simultaneous musth may be a way of ensuring that friends don't compete too directly.

Our other significant finding is an understanding of how these young males shift their foraging ranges from those that they knew when they were with their mothers to establishing a core bull area. This shift is a challenging change of ranging as they move to areas where they lack all knowledge of the distribution and seasonal availability of resources. This move often brings new risks, such as those associated with using human crops, and ranging into areas where elephants are poached and hunted. It's not surprising that this period of a male's life is also one of very high mortality; only about half of the males we studied survived to enter musth. The behavior and social strategies of these older reproductively active males are the subjects of our next chapter.