Everyone loves elephants

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

Useful trunks again

Everyone loves elephants. It’s easy to understand why. They have interesting personalities, the females are excellent mothers, protecting and caring for their calves, and elephants are most entertaining with their wonderful trunks. In fact, those trunks are amazing organs. An elephant has an extraordinary sense of smell, and the trunk is always in motion testing the air for scents. After all, it is a mobile nose.  It's also a sensitive touch organ that can feel its way through foliage and branches. The book I discussed last time, An Immense World by Ed Yong, mentions that elephants easily detect their favorite plants even when obscured in lidded boxes and surrounded by other types of vegetation, and that they can distinguish between humans the way a dog can. More importantly for the elephants, the trunk is used to check members of the herd. One researcher conducted a messy experiment of collecting fresh urine from the muddy ground, and driving ahead of an elephant group. She would then deposit it on the ground some way in front of the group. If the urine was from an elephant of another group, it was ignored; if from an elephant of the group, it was checked and then the group proceeded. But if the sample came from a member of the group behind the sniffer, it caused surprise and much additional checking. So not only did the elephants know who the source was, but also where they expected that individual to be.

"toeing" can indicate listening through the feet

Elephants also have apparently complex communication using infra-sound rumbles that are transmitted through the ground and sensed by their feet. In theory, the waves travelling through the earth could reach the other side of the world! What elephants deduce from these seismic signals is a much harder question, and they aren’t telling at the moment.

They also seem happy to interact with humans, provided they are given space and respect. This is described in the book by the late Laurence Anthony The Elephant Whisperer. There are even some hints in the book that suggest a relationship between Lawrence and his elephants (or between the elephants and their Lawrence) that transcends any form of communication that we can analyze scientifically.

Tree damage in the Chobe National Park

Unfortunately, like most happy stories, there is an intrinsic tension. Elephants require an enormous amount to eat—something like 350 lbs of vegetation every day. They have seven complete sets of teeth, and once those are gone, they starve to death. It must be challenging to be always hungry, and they usually rest during the heat of the day in order to use most of the cooler night for feeding. They have essentially no natural enemies—other than man—and tend to be successful if relatively slow breeders. Left to their own devices, elephant populations grow slowly but surely, with the herds led by their matriarchs wandering over vast areas in search of food. They sense rain and head to those areas for the new growth.

Lovely in the river!

The problem is what happens in drought conditions. The elephants move through the bush devastating it, eating everything they can find. That includes any tree bark that they can reach, and once the tree is ringed, it dies since nutrients can’t reach the leaves. Worse, elephants will break off large branches or push over trees altogether in order to reach a few mouthfuls of leaves that they fancy. And they do this even if there is no shortage of food. It’s a strange behavior, because most animal species (present company excluded) interact with their environments quite well, and certainly don’t go about destroying their future food supply. There isn’t a convincing theory about why they behave this way—and apparently always have. Surely, it’s not a successful evolutionary trait.

Of course, now elephants are severely restricted in their movement. In the seventies there was a horrendous die off of elephants in Kenya. The conservation authorities there believed that given their large and connected conservation areas, leaving the elephants unmanaged was the correct and natural strategy. Unfortunately, drought conditions led to the loss of thousands of elephants who died miserably of starvation and left behind devastation that seriously affected other species such as the black rhino.

In more recent times the relentless demand for ivory, drought, and the restriction of their range has led to a decrease in elephant numbers by about two thirds to below half a million world-wide. And now politics has entered the fray.

Under Ian Khama, Botswana banned trophy hunting and the transport of trophies overseas. His policy has always been that the best way of exploiting Botswana’s superb wildlife resources is through high-end tourism with a relatively small numbers of visitors who support a variety of jobs and do comparatively little harm. That strategy has contributed to Botswana’s success. However, Khama’s successor—President Masisi—sees things differently, and that’s probably not independent of his feud with Khama. He accused Khama of elitism and a lack of concern for small farmers in areas where crops were often attacked by hungry elephants. He was also berated for the loss of hunting revenue to the country. There were mutterings about corruption. Masisi reintroduced trophy hunting, citing the overpopulation of elephants in the country.

It became a huge issue in Botswana with the local people on both sides. While it's true that elephants  aren’t currently endangered in Botswana, it’s unfortunate that the issue is now being argued against the background of personal animosity and party politics.

As for the longer term, elephant populations are decreasing in most African countries and climate change will almost certainly devastate some of their natural feeding ranges.

Enjoy them while you can.