How jumbos outsmart poachers

Modern elephants can distinguish between spear-carrying Maasai warriors and potentially harmless farmers, for survival. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

Two years ago, an elephant set off on a treacherous 209-kilometre three-week trek from Kenya to the conflict-ridden Somalia under the cloak of darkness, and stayed there for a day and a half.

He was the first Kenyan elephant on record to visit Somalia in 20 years.

Researchers suspect that he was there to mate, but he could have been there for something else. See, current research shows that elephants tend to seek refuge in safe havens and squat down during seasons of heavy poaching, having developed this as a survival mechanism.

They also move to safety to flee from conflict, urbanisation, agriculture and other pressures.

For the Somalia-bound jumbo, “moving at night was an extreme form of survival in a region where elephants are under threat from poaching,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, a United Kingdom charity, whose researchers collaborated with researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, for a study on how elephants have adapted to escape threats on their lives.

Researchers also noted that elephants developed sophisticated gestures, sounds and chemical secretions to relay messages to each other for survival.

MOVED TO SAFETY

These signals were used when the elephants sensed danger or when they were in distress, sending a message to other members of the herd on the need to move to safety. In Mozambique, where elephants were killed for meat to feed soldiers and their ivory sold to fund purchase of weapons, ammunition and other supplies during the civil conflict of 1977 to 1992, jumbos who survived still carry physical and emotional scars from the war.

As a result, they avoid expansive areas of Gorongosa National Park, where the bloodbath occurred, and have grown wary of people.

However, they don’t go down without a fight. Instead of running away from humans, who subjected their kin to untold pain and death during the conflict, the jumbos have learnt to team up and charge at vehicles. When herds come into contact with people, the matriachs send a message to the rest of the family that there is a looming threat, thus preparing them to either charge at the potential source of danger or flee, depending on the situation.

African elephants have also learnt to differentiate human languages to identify potential threats. For instance, elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park near the southern border with Tanzania can tell the difference between the voices and scents of potentially-threatening spear-carrying Maasai warriors and those of less-threatening farming tribes.

Studies on elephant populations increasingly illustrate the complex ways in which they communicate and, subsequently, their intelligence, which they use to gauge whether they are safe or not, based on their past interactions with humans. 

Researchers hope that with the advent of technology, scientists will discover that elephant calls have very specific meanings.

 In the meantime, current observations still offer incredible insight: In times of heavy poaching, elephants appear to gravitate towards safe havens and hunker down.

And even after the threat is gone, it can take a generation or two for elephants to relax and move beyond the boundaries of these safe spaces.

 

 

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DWINDLING TUSKERS

When elephants roamed Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than two million of them.

By the seventies, the number had dropped by half. Recent numbers from the Great Elephant Survey of 2016, show that savannah elephant populations fell by an estimated 30 per cent (144,000 jumbos) between 2007 and 2014. Today, there are only about 350,000 left on the entire continent.

Poaching is the primary reason for this decline. The 2016 survey did not include forest elephants, which live in dense, forested areas and would require labour-intensive ground counts to survey. However, estimates suggest there are only 100,000 forest elephants left today.