Dr. Chusyd conducts research in the Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Zambia, where she works to identify sources of variation in life course experiences within and between elephant species to determine how they are capable of living to similar ages as people. Additionally, she aims to better understand how human activities impact elephant health and aging, including which individuals within species are more adaptive to environmental changes, which can aid in the development of strategies and policies that allow humans and elephants to coexist. To do this, she and her team document elephant behavioral patterns, collect biological samples (e.g., dung, urine, skin tissue), and assess ecological factors.

In Congo, Chusyd studied the relationship between African forest elephant reproduction and human-induced stress. African savannah elephants have their first calf more than a decade earlier than forest elephants, and Chusyd was curious as to why this is. She hypothesized that this difference was related to stress. In two forest elephant populations—one that experienced a lot of human-elephant conflict, and one that experienced minimal human-elephant conflict—Chusyd monitored hormonal levels to assess reproductive state, investigated how human activity can act as a stressor, and then examined the association between the two. Through this work, Chusyd became interested in crop raiding behavior of forest elephants, which poses a threat to the many people who rely on crops for food and livelihood. Specifically, Chusyd’s team and collaborators are working to discover if there are certain health or physiological predictors of elephants that engage in crop raiding, and whether differences in their health status support their efforts to get higher quality food faster.

In Uganda, crossbreeding often occurs between African forest and savanna elephants. Chusyd and her team are working to discover whether hybrid elephants, the offspring of such breeding, are more adaptable to the changing environment than full-bred species. They hope to ultimately understand whether a more diverse genetic makeup offers increased flexibility physiologically or behaviorally to the elephants’ rapidly changing environment.

Chusyd’s research in Zambia, funded in part by the National Institute on Aging and in partnership with Game Rangers International, examines the effect of early life trauma on orphaned elephants, many of whom have lost their mothers due to illegal poaching. Like humans, elephants rely heavily on family and have incredible long-term memory. They can even develop something similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. GPS collars have been placed on 10 non-orphaned elephants, and an app on Chusyd’s phone allows her to monitor their location in real-time. Her team films each elephant’s actions to gather behavioral data; collects dung and urine samples for hormone analyses, parasite load, and microbiome; and collects small skin samples to test for DNA methylation and gene expression. Combined, the data give Chusyd a holistic view of the health of each elephant to assess how early life trauma shapes an elephant’s physiological and social trajectory across their life.

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