To discover more about the criminal networks sustaining this trade, researchers in the US, Kenya and Singapore have extracted as much data as possible from the products of illegal elephant ivory trafficking in Africa.

The new study analysed the DNA of tusk ivory seized from 49 large shipments impounded in African ports between 2002 and 2019. The researchers sampled 111 tonnes of ivory from at least 4,320 poached African elephants – a fraction of the total haul. These included ivory from the savanna and forest elephant species which are both listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of threatened species.

African savanna elephants, which live in the grasslands of eastern central Africa, have declined by at least 60% over the past 50 years, but the number of forest elephants, found in western central Africa, has decreased by more than 86% in 31 years.

While 111 tonnes may sound like a lot of tusk, it is likely the tip of the ivory iceberg. The new analysis indicated where many elephants are being poached in Africa, where they are being shipped from and the consumer markets in south-east Asia and elsewhere they are destined for. It found that most tusks came from repeated poaching of the same elephant populations and implicated a handful of large, interconnected networks. This knowledge could help law enforcement officials link multiple shipments to a single group, thereby tying together a raft of crimes and illuminating the true scale of criminal activity.

Inside the ivory trade

Remarkably, the data indicates that most of the 49 shipments confiscated from across Africa contained ivory from the same bands of close relatives. This suggests the tusks of several elephants poached in one place were split up and packed into separate shipping containers for transport: mainly on cargo ships, although some went via road or rail to different countries. By spreading their illegal load across numerous vessels, traffickers reduce the risk of losing a large ivory store. With nearly one billion shipping containers travelling the world each year, not all of them can be thoroughly checked.

The new data indicates that the power brokers of the elephant ivory trade network are transnational criminal organisations. Matching tusks that came from elephants in the same families – including parents and offspring and siblings – between different shipments helped to identify three major criminal groups based in Mombasa in Kenya, Kampala in Uganda and Lomo in Togo.

The Mombasa and Kampala groups may well be arms of a single large organisation, with links across east Africa and south-east Asia. Nevertheless, the possible links between criminal groups, ports and countries described in the study are probably an underestimate, given the high likelihood that most illegal ivory shipments pass undetected. There are practical constraints on DNA sampling and analysis too – not all tusks in every captured shipment can be genetically analysed.

I was alarmed to learn that my old stomping-ground, Uganda, where I was privileged to see and be among wild elephants on numerous occasions, has become a hub for this trade. The ivory illegally shipped from Uganda in this study was not principally from Ugandan elephants, but drew heavily from populations in Tanzania and Kenya instead. The data also revealed a growing web of connections between ports in different countries, indicating the expanding reach of the criminal organisations in the network.

The most recent seizure in the dataset also contained 12 tonnes of scales belonging to pangolins – the most poached animals in the world. Other ivory shipments included rhino horn. In many cases, the cover load in containers hiding animal parts is timber, but even the timber tends to originate from illegal harvests. This shows that criminal organisations behind ivory trafficking are routinely engaging in multiple wildlife and environmental crimes involving many other protected species and laundering the revenue.

Trafficking groups may change which ports they use to distribute ivory to evade increased law enforcement at an existing one. These groups appear to be large, with transnational transport networks. This means that effective law enforcement must be similarly expansive and adaptable, involving government at various levels, scientists, conservation groups and the private sector. The role of institutional corruption cannot be overlooked either. At least some of the impounded ivory was taken from a Burundi government stockpile.

Including the tusks that were not sampled, lead author of the study Samuel Wasser estimates the number of elephants represented by the total haul at 17,619. Some quick maths suggests that approximately 84,945 tonnes of elephant mass was removed, over 17 years, from the ecosystems which these animals contributed to – roughly equivalent to three times the weight of the Statue of Liberty. Considering the majority of illegal ivory shipments that pass through undetected, the scale of this ecological loss is massive.

Understanding the networks that illegal wildlife products travel can help. But while there is demand for elephant ivory, poaching and illegal trafficking will continue. Alongside more effective law enforcement, there must be a major effort to promote behaviour change among the people who buy illegal wildlife products and so fund the trade.

Investment in and ownership of illegal wildlife products must become a badge of shame rather than a status symbol.

Jason Gilchrist, Ecologist, Edinburgh Napier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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OXFORD, 17 December 2020 – An international team has discovered the origin of the largest cargo of African ivory found from the oldest shipwreck in southern Africa.  

The discovery of a 16^th-century shipwreck has, with the aid of advanced scientific techniques, provided detailed insight into elephant herds living in Africa almost 500 years ago. But the study also highlights the extensive depletion of the West African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) due to the ivory trade, and the need for conservation of this majestic animal. The study, published today, was led by Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Archaeology alongside partner institutions in Namibia (the National Museum of Namibia), South Africa (University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria) and the USA (University of Illinois). 

This unique story that links shipwrecks with elephants came to life off the coast of Namibia in 2008, when workers mining for diamonds discovered the remains of the Portuguese trading vessel Bom Jesus. The ship was lost in 1533 AD en route to India, making it the oldest shipwreck discovered in southern Africa.Incredibly some of the ship’s structure and over forty tons of valuable cargo were recovered intact – including thousands of copper pieces (ingots), gold and silver coins. 

But the most fascinating items recovered from the Bom Jesus were a collection of over 100 elephant tusks, the largest archaeological cargo of African elephant ivory ever found. The tusks were of varying lengths and sizes, ranging in weight from 2-33 kg, and came from both male and female elephants, young and old alike. The tusks were in good condition thanks to the cold waters off the coast of Namibia caused by the Benguela ocean current. 

Elephant tusks are the source of ivory, which was a valuable commodity in the 1500s and would have been used to make jewellery, mirrors and combs, decorative items and religious objects. Tusks were often traded from Africa to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but to find such a large number of tusks, and so incredibly well preserved, made this a unique find.  

“The shipwreck cargo contained materials from different parts of the world – Central European copper, German finance, Portuguese ship and perhaps crew, African ivory all destined for western India. This is an amazing snapshot of how connected the world was by the 1530s,” said Professor Shadreck Chirikure, School of Archaeology at Oxford University who led the study at Oxford University alongside Dr Ashley Coutu, Research Fellow at Pitt Rivers Museum. 

A team of experts – scientists, archaeologists and curators – came together to study the tusks and learn more about the elephants who bore them, before they were killed for their ivory. This is the first study to combine genetic, archeological and historical methods, providing much greater detail than ever before about the origin, ecological, and genetic histories of an archaeological ivory cargo.  

Scientists extracted ancient DNA – the chemical in the cell of every living thing that contains its genetic code – from the ivory to trace the source region and family history of the elephants. Ancient DNA analysis of 44 tusks determined that the elephants were Loxodonta cyclotis, or African forest elephants, rather than Loxodonta africana, savannah or grassland elephants. Further DNA sequencing traced the elephants to West Africa, which was surprising as it was expected the elephants would be from different locations across both Central and West Africa where trading networks to move ivory over long distances had been established thousands of years before the sailing of the Bom Jesus.    

Another surprise was that the elephants did not live in deep forests as most forest elephants do today. Dr Coutu studied the chemical elements in the tusks (stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen – isotopes are also used to determine the age of fossils through radiocarbon dating) to reveal that these elephants actually lived in scrubby woodland savannahs, not the deep tropical forests along the West African coast where almost all forest elephants live. “This information gave us a picture of the ecology of the West African forest elephant in its historic landscape. Knowing more about historic environments in which forest elephants thrived will benefit wildlife conservation today,” said Dr Ashley Coutu. 

But the research also reveals a loss of West African forest elephant herds in the last 400 years. The team found that the cargo came from 17 different herds with a distinct family lineage. Of those 17, only 4 of those same lineages still exist and are known from modern West African elephant populations. This means that the other lineages have been lost, primarily due to the hunting of elephants for ivory that took place in the centuries that followed.  

“The other lineages disappeared because West Africa has lost more than 95% of its elephants in subsequent centuries due to hunting and habitat destruction,” said Alfred Roca Professor of Animal Sciences from the University of Illinois who worked together with Oxford University on the project. The genetic information recovered from these lost herds adds a huge amount to the relatively limited amount of data available for scientists to study the remaining forest elephants across the African continent.     

The ivory trade, which continued up until the 20^th century, devastated Africa’s elephant population. Estimates suggest the population reduced from 26 million elephants in 1800 to fewer than one million today. A worldwide ban on ivory sales was instituted in 1989, which reversed the downward trend in the population. Despite the ban, the ivory trade continues illegally, and an estimated 20,000 elephants are killed in Africa annually. 

This research study was led by Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, one of the leading and best-known museums of anthropology, ethnography and archaeology in the world. It holds over 500,000 items acquired across 130 years, covering all periods of human existence.  

Pitt Rivers leads research on its collections and is actively exploring difficult histories and addressing the colonial past. Oxford School of Archaeology hosts world-class research facilities fundamental to addressing big questions relating to humans and their interaction with the environment in the past. This collaborative research across continents has provided an opportunity to look at the legacy of the ivory trade. But it has also introduced a new way to examine the vast collections of historic and archaeological ivories in museums across the world and showed the vital significance of science in this work.

“There is tremendous potential to analyse historic ivory from other shipwrecks, as well as museum collections. These scientific techniques are vital for understanding the histories of elephant populations, people who hunted and traded the ivory, as well as the global history of the ancient ivory trade, which increasingly drew Europe, Africa, and Asia together via the Atlantic Ocean,” said Dr. Ashley Coutu, Research Fellow, Pitt Rivers Museum. 

Source: Oxford University
Photo credits: National Museum of Namibia
Map created by Alida de Flamingh

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Megaherbivores are more concerned about eating as much food as possible while expending the minimum amount of effort, than about avoiding potential predators. Elephants may consume as much as 600 pounds of vegetation in a day; giraffes, about 75. This drove scientists to wonder about the impact of these megaherbivores on vegetation across a range of landscapes in the savanna.

“Previous studies have demonstrated that megaherbivores adjust their movement patterns to avoid costly mountaineering,” said co-author David Kenfack, STRI staff scientist, coordinator of the ForestGEO network forest monitoring plots in Africa and recently elected Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. “We wanted to know the extent to which fine-scale variations in topography may influence browsing damage by these charismatic megaherbivores and evaluate whether seasonal shortages in food availability would force the megaherbivores to venture into areas with rugged terrain.”

Their observations conducted within a 120-hectare Smithsonian ForestGEO long-term vegetation monitoring plot located at Mpala Research Center in Kenya confirmed that giraffes and elephants prefer flat ground while foraging. They compared the damage on Acacia mellifera trees, which grow all over the savanna landscape and are a common meal for megaherbivores. They found that the trees growing on steep slopes were taller and had fewer stems than those in valleys and plateaus, suggesting that elephant and giraffes tend to avoid feeding in these less accessible habitats.

This behavior did not change during the dry season, when resources become scarce, indicating that these two species would rather disperse to new areas with more favorable conditions than climb up a nearby slope to feed.

For the authors, these feeding patterns may help preserve steep slopes as habitat refugia, with a greater diversity and density of vegetation than more frequently visited areas. Their findings support this argument: the number and variety of trees encountered on the steep slopes was higher than in the valleys and plateaus.

“This study has broadened our understanding of the role of topography in explaining diversity patterns of plants,” said Duncan Kimuyu, a Smithsonian Mpala postdoctoral fellow, lecturer at Karatina University in Kenya and main author of the study. “Further research is warranted to understand how other factors such as differences in soil properties may interact with topography and megaherbivores to influence the growth and survival of vegetation in the African savanna.”

Source: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Photo credit: Duncan Kimuyu
Journal Reference: Duncan M. Kimuyu, David Kenfack, Paul M. Musili, Robert O. Ang’ila. Fine‐scale habitat heterogeneity influences browsing damage by elephant and giraffe. Biotropica, 2020 DOI: 10.1111/btp.12848

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Silent Forests is an intimate, character-driven portrait of conservationists and activists who are struggling to stop forest elephant poaching in Africa’s Congo Basin region. The film explores this story through a range of dynamic subjects; including one of Cameroon’s first female eco-guards, a grassroots wildlife law enforcement group, a Congolese biologist studying elephant behavior, a reformed elephant poacher, and a team of anti-poaching sniffer dogs led by a Czech conservationist.

We begin deep in the forests of Congo-Brazzaville with biologist Clement Inkamba-Nkulu. Clement researches elephant clearings in the Bateke Plateau, doing acoustic monitoring to evaluate the abundance of elephants living in this dense forest. His studies are part of a larger regional effort called the Elephant Listening Project. The ELP studies forest elephant communication to help deepen our understanding about how these complex and intelligent animals “speak” with each other and form social bonds.

In neighboring Cameroon, we meet eco-guard Sidonie Asseme, a mother of five who has worked as a park ranger for the last decade –one of Cameroon’s very first female eco-guards. She treks for weeks on end in the dense jungle, searching for poaching camps – and her dedication has led to the arrest and detention of 15 poachers and counting. Not surprisingly, though, her work has made her a target: she has received death threats, beatings, and was once locked in a house by poachers who threatened to set her and three other rangers on fire.

An important part of Sidonie’s job is bio-monitoring, or observing the various animals that come and go from park clearings. Her favorite animals to see in the wild are the forest elephants; but in these same clearings that she used to see plentiful elephant herds at, she now sees none. “The poaching has scared them all off, they are really threatened here.” To drive home her point, she and her fellow eco-guards find recently abandoned poaching camps all around the clearings they are monitoring.

The film then goes from the depths of the forest to the chaotic streets of Yaounde, to meet Eric Tah and the LAGA Wildlife Law Enforcement Group. LAGA is a grassroots group of dedicated Cameroonian activists that have carried out countless operations into the web of wildlife crime in this region. They are just launching a new investigation into a trafficker who calls himself “Sans Peur”, or “Without Fear.” We observe the hours of work and planning that go into a sting operation. These investigations come with a high risk, especially when the criminals one is targeting are well-connected. Adding to the difficulties is the endemic corruption at some of the highest echelons of police and government ministries. The filmmakers embed with LAGA’s undercover unit and follow the anatomy of an investigation from start to finish – including the critical moment that a trafficker is taken down.

In the Republic of Congo, sniffer dogs are used for finding endangered species products that poachers are attempting to smuggle out of the country. This dog team is led by Arthur Sneigon, a Czech conservationist who has spearheaded anti-poaching activism in Congo since 2014. Recently, Arthur has struggled to get permission from the government to continue his sniffer dog operations. He laments that he is stuck in a web of bureaucracy and corruption, with administrators demanding bribes that he cannot pay. Arthur is part of the same activist network as Eric’s group LAGA, and the two sometimes work together across country borders to take down wildlife criminals. The film follows Arthur from Congo to Cameroon, where he is part of an investigation into a major ivory trafficking network – with a ringleader who smuggles ivory through a U.N. refugee camp.

The final focus of Silent Forests is Jean-Paul, a former elephant poacher who now owns a small cocoa farm and herd of goats. He is the head of a support group of reformed poachers in this area; they are atoning for their past actions and finding less destructive ways of making a living. We attend a meeting of this support group, where Jean-Paul and other members discuss the recent increase of poaching in the area, and plans for the future of their alliance.

Jean-Paul speaks about the poverty that drove him to poach in the first place, and he expresses regret at his decades of slaughter. “When I killed them, I felt terrible. The elephant – it’s like a person. When you kill them, the family sees it, and flees into the forest. If you hunted the Dad elephant, who did the Mom live with after that? What happened to his family?” The irony that his own concern for feeding his family caused him to decimate elephant families isn’t lost on Jean-Paul.

As passionate and tenacious as these conservationists are, they are up against huge institutional challenges like corruption and lack of funding that threaten to derail all their attempts to fight for the future of the forest elephant.

Silent Forests is Mariah Wilson’s third film about wildlife crime and illegal trade; it is a subject she is both passionate about and familiar with. Mariah’s hope is that this documentary will shed light on the severity of the situation in central Africa, and how damaging the ivory trade is for all species — humans included.

The film stands out from some other recent documentaries about poaching issues because three of the four main characters are from either Cameroon or Congo. This is about African activists, scientists, and eco-guards and who care deeply about what is happening in their own backyards. Mariah wants audiences to leave Silent Forests with a realistic look at what it is like to be on the frontlines of conservation in this region day to day – including the dangers, the rewards, the frustrations – and how good efforts are riddled with challenges from dishonest and inept government entities.

Urgent measures are need to save the remaining African forest elephants. Illegal poaching for ivory and encroachment into elephant habitat must be halted, and the international demand for ivory, which fuels poaching and the illegal trade, must be stopped.

More information: https://silentforests.com

Watch the documentary

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A letter has been delivered by hand to the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, urging the Chinese president to halt the reportedly imminent import of 33 captive elephants from Zimbabwe to undisclosed captive facilities in China (word on the ground estimates that the transport will occur today or tomorrow). The letter is penned by a group of thirty-five global specialists in elephant biology, husbandry, elephant management, legal and policy analysis, economics and conservation, most of whom are based in Africa. A similar letter was hand delivered to HE Mr Frederick Musiiwa Makamure Shava, the Zimbabwean ambassador to the UN, urging the President of Zimbabwe to stop the export.

In response to the news that a Chinese crew had arrived in Zimbabwe last week to prepare 33 baby elephants for export from Hwange National Park, Zimbabwean activists launched a last-minute bid to prevent it. After being forcibly removed from their families, the elephants have been living in captivity for nearly a year. The People and Earth Solidarity Law Network, a Zimbabwean NGO, filed a lawsuit in May 2019 that demanded details of the export deal. The case (HC4289/19) is before the courts but has not yet been heard by a judge. Their lawyers have sent a letter to the lawyers for Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks), stating that going ahead with the translocation “will amount to reckless disregard of the court process”.

Tinashe Farawo, a spokesperson for ZimParks, has denied that anything untoward is occurring or that the deal is secret, according to a report in the UK Telegraph. He did not, however, deny that the translocation is occurring.

The expert letter delivered to HE Mr Ma Zhaoxu, Chinese ambassador to the UN, urgently calls on “the President of the People’s Republic of China to immediately suspend and ultimately cancel the plans for this import.” It emphasises that China has made considerable progress towards becoming a conservation champion through its ‘Ecological Civilisation’ programme and decision to close its domestic ivory markets. In line with a recent decision taken by an overwhelming majority of parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) – that no elephants may be taken from the wild in Zimbabwe and Botswana and placed in captivity – the letter appeals to Chinese authorities to allow the captured elephants “to be returned to their only ‘appropriate and acceptable destinations’, the natural habitats of Africa”.

Zimbabwe and China are not the only countries involved in this questionable activity. Pakistan has reportedly applied to import 10 African elephants from Namibia. The same group of experts have therefore also hand delivered letters to the Namibian and Pakistani ambassadors to the UN, urging the presidents of both countries to refrain from going ahead with any export-import deal.

Global opinion has moved strongly towards condemning the holding of elephants in any kind of captivity, as evidenced by an international Indaba on the matter held in South Africa in September.

Copies of the letters can be found here:

• Urgent Letter Regarding Imminent Import of 33 Young Elephants to China
• Urgent Letter regarding Imminent Export of 33 Young Elephants to China
• Urgent Letter Regarding Import of Elephants to Pakistan from Africa
• Urgent Letter re Proposed Export of Elephants from Namibia to Pakistan

Source: EMS Foundation

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Of the eight pangolin species, four are found in Africa. These are the white‐bellied, black‐bellied, giant, and Temminck’s ground pangolin. Three of these species live in Central African forests. The tree-dwelling white-bellied and black-bellied pangolins, weighing approximately 1.5 to 3kg (comparable to a small rabbit), and the ground-dwelling giant pangolin can weigh up to 33kg (the weight of a small Labrador dog).

But little is known about population sizes, mortality rates, and reproductive potential of African pangolins. Mounting evidence suggests that as the availability of Asian pangolins declines, and international trade flows increase, traders increasingly supply the more abundant and less expensive African pangolins to meet demand.

Seizures of pangolins and their scales and skins from Africa, destined for Asia, are increasing with over 53 tons seized in 2013 alone. These estimates likely represent a fraction of all pangolins traded, and an even smaller portion of the number of pangolins hunted.

To better understand how many pangolins are hunted in Central Africa each year, I and a team of researchers collated information on the quantities of animals that hunting villages extract from the forest, from studies conducted over the last 20 years. By doing this we can provide crucial information on regional trends which can be used to inform conservation actions and policy.

What we found

We looked into the number of animals hunted in villages and offered for sale by collating data from research and reports that covered over 100 areas in sub-Saharan Africa between 1975 and 2014.

We extracted information on whether the animal was eaten or sold, how they were hunted, the sex, age category, and price. Other species typically hunted for meat include blue duikers, brush-tailed porcupines and greater cane rats.

For Central African forests in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo, we estimated that at least 400,000 pangolins are hunted annually for meat.

But we don’t yet know whether pangolins can withstand these levels of hunting. This is mainly because we don’t yet have reliable pangolin population estimates for any of the species that inhabit Central African forests. Ideally, we would also need population and hunting data in the same location to be able to understand the levels of hunting that lead to population declines.

Pressures

The pressures on African pangolins are likely increasing for several reasons.

Firstly, increasing deforestation across West and Central African countries has reduced their habitat, particularly for the semi-arboreal white-bellied pangolin and the arboreal black-bellied pangolin, which rely on forest habitats.

As the human populations grow in West, Eastern and Central Africa, this may exacerbate trends in deforestation and wildlife consumption.

Secondly, increases in the accessibility of remote areas to people and extractive industries may lead to more pangolin hunting. For example, a recent study showed that Asian industry workers in Gabon requested pangolins from hunters more than any other species.

 

Finally, the international trafficking of pangolins over the past decade has boomed. They are one of the most trafficked wild mammals in the world. For example, eight tonnes of pangolin scales trafficked from Nigeria, one of the largest ever hauls of scales, was intercepted a couple of weeks ago in Hong Kong.

Time to act

While the media has greatly increased its coverage of the plight of pangolins in recent years, financial and political support for conservation is still greatly needed. This includes support for pangolin population monitoring, identification of pangolin strongholds and areas in need of conservation, and the identification, design and testing of conservation interventions, where needed.

Without these steps we may see the African pangolins follow in the footsteps of their Asian counterparts.

Daniel J Ingram, Researcher in Conservation, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In exchange, they became slaves to their appetite. Elephants need huge amounts of food everyday, something like 5-10% of their body mass. A typical three-tonne female could eat 200 kg of plant material in one day. Her family may need to consume more than a tonne of food per day. It is not easy to find so much food, especially in tropical rain forests, where plants have high concentrations of chemical defences (toxins) to avoid being eaten. Elephants spend most of their life eating and looking for food. We can think of them as “eating machines”. African forest elephants are particularly fond of saplings, young trees, and the plants that first grow into newly opened gaps in the forest. These “early succession” plants are specialised in growing fast following a disturbance and they invest less in chemical defences. Early succession trees also have lower wood density than slow-growing late-succession tree species. Elephant eating manners are also remarkable. They feed by breaking stems and branches, pulling down lianas, uprooting whole plants, stripping leaves off twigs, and so on. It is easy to notice their presence because of the mess they leave behind.

How elephant disturbance affects carbon stocks

The key novelty of the new study, by the ecologist Fabio Berzaghi and colleagues, is they include, for the first time, the effect of elephant feeding disturbances in a computer model that simulates demographic processes in forest ecosystems. They found that “elephant disturbance” – all that messy eating – results in forests having fewer, larger trees. Elephants filter out small early-succession (i.e. low wood density) trees, promoting the dominance of late-succession (high wood density) trees, which ultimately leads to long-term increases in the total biomass. Berzaghi and colleagues were able to validate their model predictions with data from real forest plots in the Congo Basin.

By promoting these larger, woodier trees, elephant feeding disturbances therefore mean the forest stores more carbon. These results have important and far reaching implications for elephant conservation and carbon policy. The authors estimate that the disappearance of African forest elephants would result in a loss of as much as 7% of the carbon stocks in Central African forests, which they valued at around US$43 billion, based on a conservative carbon stock price. In short, forest elephants are our allies in the fight against climate change and their existence saves us tens of billions of dollars in climate responses.

Forest elephants could soon disappear

The situation of African forest elephants is particularly dramatic. Once numbered in the millions, their population is now less than 10% of its potential size and, in the decade from 2002 to 2011, as many as 62% of forest elephants might have been killed. This decline is mostly due to poaching to feed Asian demand for ivory as well as increasing human encroaching of their habitats. What a sad reason for a massacre and an ecological disaster.

Scientists largely recognise African bush (Loxodonta africana) and forest (L. cyclotis) elephants as different species. However because of practical challenges (such as dealing with abundant hybrid populations), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which officially tracks endangered species, has kept the two together. The problem is that the more populous bush elephants have masked a drastic reduction in their forest cousins. Berzaghi and colleagues emphasise the need for forest elephants to be finally acknowledged as their own species. This would give them a separate IUCN Red List status – probably marked as “endangered” – and trigger important policies and actions.

Conserving elephants helps fight climate change

Berzaghi and colleagues show that forest elephants produce ecosystem services in the form of climate stability from which we all benefit, including people like you and me who might never visit the forests of Central Africa. If we are all beneficiaries of elephant conservation, we should be also responsible for it. It is very important that more affluent societies assume a bigger share of the responsibility to conserve the elephants and other tropical biodiversity from which we benefit. In the past decade we have learned a lot about how important elephants and other large animals are for functioning ecosystems. It is time to apply this knowledge. Berzaghi and colleagues produced evidence linking the behaviour of a single species – feeding disturbances by African forest elephants – to global-scale climatic impacts. As mentioned earlier, the bad news is that we humans are killing elephants and ruining our planet. The good news is that we could synergise efforts and fight climate change by effectively protecting and restoring forest elephant populations and their habitats. The choice seems obvious to me.

Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, Professor in Tropical Conservation Ecology, University of Nottingham This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Children in every corner of the globe can identify an elephant in a wildlife lineup. They are as recognizable as any basic shape and as endearing as any household pet. Yet the same cannot be said for the hundreds of tropical flora and fauna that are liable to disappear should forest elephant populations continue to crash.

“[Elephants] have a disproportionately large impact on their ecosystem and the organisms living in it,” says John R. Poulsen, assistant professor of tropical ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “If people are aware of the potential result of losing elephants […] perhaps they can transfer that understanding to less well known species.”

Poulsen and his colleagues recently published a study in Conservation Biology examining how the loss of forest elephants would impact the rest of their natural habitat. After diligently reviewing dozens of papers on Afrotropical flora and fauna, they predict that the loss of forest elephants will reshape the ecological processes at work in their environment. Species composition will change, in addition to the size and abundance of large tree species — and, by extension, the ability of these ecosystems to store carbon dioxide.

“[The] killing of elephants for their ivory is not only depriving the world of one of its most charismatic species, but might also be making the Earth less inhabitable for humans,” Poulsen says.

A Tale of Two Species

Although many people are familiar with elephant conservation, few know that the African elephant is not one, but two distinct species: forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) and savanna (Loxodonta Africana). The two are different in their anatomy, reproduction, even their social structures.

When most people think of Africa’s elephants they are actually picturing savanna elephants: those that live out in the open, in places like the Serengeti, and are therefore easier to study. Forest elephants are comparatively smaller and weave their way through vibrant Afrotropical forests, such as in the Congo, forging elephant-wide paths as they do so. Scientists looking at genetic markers estimate the two species split between 2 million and 6.5 million years ago; humans and chimpanzees, by comparison, diverged between 5 million and 7 million years ago.

Despite such differences, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) does not currently recognize forest and savanna elephants as distinct species. Both fall under the title of African elephant.

“The two-species question is pretty much accepted by the taxonomists but has yet to be officialized by IUCN,” says Fiona Maisels, surveys and monitoring adviser at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Gabon.

Scientists generally define species as a group of organisms that can successfully mate and produce fertile offspring. The primary holdup in the case of the African elephant is that forest and savanna elephants can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, and occasionally have. However, this is also the case with wolves and coyotes, which are universally considered distinct species. And many bacteria and plants reproduce without mating at all, which provides further confusion.

But, according to Poulsen, treating the two African elephant species as one has had dire implications for their respective conservation. When forest and savanna elephants are bundled together as “African elephants,” it inflates the true population of each species.

“With a larger population, the conservation status of the ‘African elephant’ can be listed as ‘Vulnerable,’” Poulsen says, “which allows some [southern] African countries the possibility of trading ivory.”

If the IUCN recognized forest and savanna elephants as distinct, both species would be considered “endangered,” likely necessitating stricter rules for trading ivory.

According to Poulsen, the current unified conservation assessment is a barrier to the protection of forest elephants in particular. In Central Africa, 62 percent of forest elephants were lost between 2002 and 2011, primarily due to poaching. However, as they are considered the same species as the savanna elephant, the IUCN recorded a smaller overall loss in the “African elephant” population. A study in 2013 by Maisels found that current forest elephant populations are only at 10 percent of their potential size.

We are losing these elephants without knowing much of what their extinction might mean for Afrotropical forests, for Central Africa, and even for global climate.

“The problem is that elephant populations are doing poorly in most places and allowing the sale of ivory has traditionally grown the demand, rather than saturating it, leading to killing across the entire range of both species,” Poulsen says.

Big Feet, Big Footprint

Forest elephants are ecosystem engineers, meaning their various behaviors heavily alter their habitat.

Their size matters. Although smaller than their savanna counterparts, forest elephants are still just that: elephants. Simply by walking around, they can shape their environment. By moving in herds, their impact is multiplied. By stomping saplings, peeling bark, breaking limbs, clipping branches and trampling vegetation, forest elephants generate trail systems that can stretch tens of kilometers.

All of that elephant activity shapes the forest canopy. Poulsen and his colleagues say that, although destructive, the elephants clear the understory of the forest, allowing large trees to spread their roots and grow to their greatest heights. Without this service, greater competition for light and soil could slow tree growth and reduce trees’ potential size.

Elephants are also the largest fruit-eating animals on the planet, and they aren’t picky about their food. They consume more than 500 plant species in Central Africa. Plants that produce fruit often rely on animals to disperse their seeds far and wide. Since elephants are so large, they can eat and carry seeds that are too big, hard or fibrous for other, smaller animals. Forest elephants, and forest elephants alone, disperse the seeds of at least 43 plant species in Central Africa.

By doing so, they also boost the odds that the seeds will take root. The digestive tract of elephants improves the germination time and growth rates of seedlings that pass through it.

Additionally, the wide swaths of forest floor that elephants open up provide ample space for new seedlings to settle.

Dung is another important contribution from forest elephants. Although poop may seem an unlikely gift, it is a critical ingredient for lush forests. Besides light and water, the most important thing for forest health is nutrients. As elephants chew, swallow, digest and excrete, they unlock and redistribute nutrients like sodium and nitrogen that would otherwise stay put. And when they excavate termite mounds and salt licks, they unearth rare nutrients like potassium, calcium, magnesium and sodium, which would have been previously inaccessible to the rest of the forest. Elephants in the forest unlock and redistribute the building blocks of life, broadly dispersing ingredients both rare and critical throughout the forest.

“I have walked through forests with healthy elephant populations and forests that have been elephant-free for decades. There is a stark difference,” Poulsen says. “Elephant-free forests can have a thick understory and middle story with lots of herbaceous vegetation and thorny vines, visibility is limited and it is difficult to walk through. Forests with elephants can look like a park with good visibility and well-worn trails to walk along.”

Making Molehills of Mountains

The great footprint of the forest elephant doesn’t tread on just Central African forests. Tropical forests are an integral component of global carbon storage. The larger the tree, the more carbon it sequesters over its lifetime.

“While there is a big focus on stopping deforestation, we speculate that the loss of elephants might also affect the ability of forests to store carbon,” Poulsen says.

Because forest elephants are key to the growth and survival of large trees, the loss of elephants means less carbon sequestration by Africa’s forests — and a warmer planet, according to the paper.

To conserve both African elephant species — and every plant, animal and fungus that relies on the ecosystem services they provide — the demand for ivory must end. Poulsen is adamant that the two species must be listed as distinct in order to have the proper restrictions in place for the ivory trade.

Poulsen says the U.S. public can help by expressing concern for elephant conservation to their congresspersons. Although Central Africa may seem distant, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), as well as other federal agencies, delegate a portion of funding to international conservation in the African tropics. Poulsen also encourages speaking out against allowing tusks and elephant body parts to be imported into the United States and elsewhere.

This spring, the Trump Administration allowed elephant parts to be imported via the USFWS on a case-by-case basis.

“The only way to stop the ivory trade and the killing of elephants,” Poulsen says, “is to shut down all trade of ivory, everywhere.”

Citations

Poulsen J.R., Rosin C, Meier A, Mills E, Nuñez C. L., et al. (2018) Ecological consequences of forest elephant declines for Afrotropical forests. Conservation Biology 32 (3). DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13035

Maisels F, Strindberg S, Blake S, Wittemyer G, Hart J, et al. (2013) Devastating Decline of Forest Elephants in Central Africa. PLOS ONE 8(3): e59469. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059469

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evo_41

https://news.mongabay.com/2013/03/62-of-all-africas-forest-elephants-killed-in-10-years-warning-graphic-images/

Article published by Maria Salazar in Mongabay

The post Size Matters: Forest Elephants Important For Ecosystems And Humans In West Central Africa appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

By Katarzyna Nowak, University of the Free State

When people cultivate food crops on or near wild lands it can be assumed that wild animals will eat them – what’s known as crop-raiding. Farms in the vicinity of protected areas can expect to be visited by a range of wild animals including birds, rodents, and large mammals like monkeys, bushpigs and elephants.

Because of their size, elephants are the most conspicuous crop-user and may, in addition to eating crops, trample farmers’ fields and break fences. Using nonlethal ways to deter elephants from farms is the most humane and effective defence long-term. But elephants are still being shot and killed, particularly if they threaten people or property.

Given that elephant numbers are dwindling, creative solutions need to be found to reduce crop losses and improve the chances of elephants and people coexisting.

Over the past eight years we have been trying to do just that. We have been collecting data on elephants – their consumption patterns and their impact on crops at a forested site in southern Tanzania. And we’ve been working with farmers to try and design ways of keeping elephants at bay.

After some failures, we imported an idea from Kenya – beehives. After five years of study we’ve published our results which show that there is indeed merit to installing fences made up with beehives to keep elephants from eating, and destroying, farmers’ crops.

What failed, what worked

One method farmers tried to adopt involved collecting and soaking elephant dung in buckets of water and spreading the fibrous mixture across their fields. The basis of this interesting idea was that elephants are coprophobic – they don’t like their own poo – and will avoid eating crops covered in their own dung.

We were unable to test the effectiveness of this approach because Udzungwa Mountains National Park introduced new rules in 2011 that banned people from collecting firewood as well as non-timber products such as elephant dung from the park.

Farmers then tried chilli-oil. Cloth, soaked in used motor oil and powdered chillies, was then attached to rope fences. But heavy rains in the Udzungwa Mountains meant that the mixture had to be reapplied regularly.

Beehive fences can help reduce elephants’ damage to crops.
Author supplied

Next we looked to our neighbours for a solution – beehives. These were being used in elephant conservation field programmes in Kenya and the practice was spreading to other African countries and also to Asia.

Using beehives at our site involved installing a fence between the park boundary and farms. The beehives are connected with a wire. When elephants attempt to enter fields they disturb the wire which causes the hives to swing. This in turn disturbs the bees inside the hives. Our initial short 500m fence of 50 hives was eventually extended by 600m and 87 hives four years ago.

Our findings after five years of study show that there’s promise in the approach.

Our findings

Our main finding was that the probability of elephants damaging crops was less with the construction of the short beehive fences, and even lower when the fence was extended.

We also found that as more hives making up the fence were inhabited by bees, the more elephants stayed away.

A few factors affected the success of the beehive fences. These included:

• Elephants breaching the fence where hives were empty. Of the 133 fence breaches, nearly 70% were between empty hives.
• Not mending damaged fences promptly.
• Elephant bulls visiting farms at night, when bees are relatively less active.

The beehive fence didn’t completely eliminate elephants entering farms. But it did reduce the number of elephant visits and was well-received by farmers.

Another indicator of success was that farmers stopped calling game officers to shoot problem elephants. Farmers also formed and registered a cooperative group to manage the beehive fence and honey harvests.

The beehive fence method is spreading

The use of beehive fences is beginning to spread across southern Tanzania. And government has recently advised that beehives be used to deter elephants from crops around the Serengeti, in northern Tanzania.

Next steps should involve standardising how sites employing this method are monitored and evaluated. This could help determine the minimum effective fence length and optimal placement of beehives.

Other lessons could be learnt that might be replicated in new sites. For example, unoccupied – or dummy hives – have been shown to be effective but presumably only if elephants have already developed a negative association with occupied ones.

Finally, researching the differences in the relative nighttime activity of both elephants and honeybees across sites could also help explain differences in outcomes and inform best deterrent approaches and improvements.

Our programme has already pioneered the use of camera traps to monitor elephant activity and identify crop-using individuals in the vicinity of beehive fences. These could be used at other sites too.

Katarzyna Nowak, Fellow at The Safina Center, University of the Free State

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Elephants are the world’s most iconic megafauna group, yet until now there was no comprehensive genomic assessment of their relationships. A consortium of scientists, including researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard Medical School, Uppsala University, the University of Potsdam, McMaster University, and the University of Illinois, used advanced sequencing technology to recover complete genomes from both living and extinct elephant species.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors generated 14 genomes, including two from the American mastodon, which is an extinct elephant relative, and 12 from both living and extinct elephants species including an 120,000-y-old straight-tusked elephant, a Columbian mammoth, and woolly mammoths.

Earlier genetic studies modelled elephant evolution via simple branching trees, but this study shows that interspecies hybridization has been a recurrent feature of elephant evolution.

“This paper, the product of a grand initiative we started more than a decade ago, is far more than just the formal report of the elephant genome. It will be a reference point for understanding how diverse elephants are related to each other and it will be a model for conducting similar studies in other species groups,” said co-senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, a senior director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad Institute and professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“There’s been a simmering debate in the conservation communities about whether African savannah and forest elephants are two different species,” said David Reich, another co-senior author at the Broad Institute who is also a professor at the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “Our data show that these two species have been isolated for long periods of time, making each worthy of independent conservation status.”

The researchers found that the genetic makeup of the straight-tusked elephant, previously placed as a sister group to African forest elephants, in fact comprises three major components. Most of the straight-tusked elephant’s ancestry derives from a lineage related to the ancestor of African elephants while its remaining ancestry consists of a large contribution from a lineage related to forest elephants and another related to mammoths.

Columbian and woolly mammoths also showed evidence of interbreeding. While hybridization events have contributed to elephant evolution, isolation also played an important role.

The study data reveal nearly complete isolation between the ancestors of the African forest and savanna elephants for 500,000 years. The study confirms that the African savannah and forest elephants are two distinct species, findings that should help to make the case to protect both.

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