One hundred years ago, there were about ten million African elephants and , Asian elephants the two primary species , reports World Wildlife Magazine. Those numbers have plummeted in the last century, and the survival of these majestic creatures is in question. Right now there are approximately , elephants left in the world. Find out just how smart elephants really are.
African elephants are the globe's largest land animals, weighing in at an average of six tons, a half-ton more than Asian elephants. African elephants roam the Congo Basin and the coastal regions of Eastern Africa. Asian elephants can be found mainly in the Eastern Himalayas, as well as the forest regions of Thailand, China, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Both species are threatened by poachers seeking to sell their ivory tusks, skin, and other body parts. They are also threatened by capture to fuel the tourism trade, as well as habitat loss due to deforestation.
In a bit of good news, conservation efforts are helping the African elephant population to rebound—their numbers are slowly increasing.
Unfortunately, the population of Asian elephants is still in decline; one type of Asian elephant is on the list of 14 animal species that could disappear in your lifetime. Elephants require a lot of land and resources to survive, and this often puts them at odds with local human populations.
In Kenya alone, farmers and wildlife rangers kill between 50 and elephants each year when the animals damage farms. The World Wildlife Fund is encouraging non-lethal methods to keep elephants from eating crops, such as "chili bombs"—a combination of chili and dung. In addition, the locals are learning methods of farming that help keep elephants at bay and planting new crops that require less land.
If you can't make it out to the Congo or to India yourself, there are still ways you can view and help save these precious creatures. Now, for the first time, scientists have separately evaluated how the two are faring—and the findings are grim. Elephants are highly social and form tight family groups. Evidence has been building since the early s that forest and savanna elephants should be split taxonomically into two species.
In , when the IUCN issued its last assessment of African elephants, it still considered them a single species, then described as vulnerable to extinction. In the years since, scientists came to recognize that forest and savanna elephants are distinct from each other. Since the assessment, an elephant poaching crisis has also gripped Africa. In , researchers reported in the journal PeerJ that between and , savanna elephants declined by 30 percent in 18 African countries.
Poaching peaked in and since has eased in some places, notably in parts of East Africa. But it persists and is worsening in other regions, especially in Central and West Africa. Meanwhile, elephant habitat continues to be degraded by or lost to human activity. In particular, the new report should attract more attention to forest elephants. Less visible and easily monitored than savanna elephants, they tend to be overlooked by governments and donors, and their needs are overshadowed by those of their larger cousins, Gobush says.
Bureaucratically, the two species have mostly continued to be grouped together, which can hinder conservation efforts for both, says Sue Lieberman , vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in New York City. To arrive at the new findings, Gobush and her colleagues assessed all available data for both species across hundreds of field sites, dating back to the s for savanna elephants and the s for forest elephants. Using those data, they built a statistical model to estimate population reductions over time.
What came to light was that savanna elephants have declined by more than 50 percent over three generations 75 years , tipping them into the endangered category. Longer-lived forest elephant numbers have fallen by more than 80 percent over three generations 93 years , making them critically endangered. If anything, the IUCN findings likely are underestimates because of the scarcity of quantitative data about past elephant populations across the continent, says Iain Douglas-Hamilton , founder of Save the Elephants, a nonprofit based in Kenya, who also was not involved with the new evaluation.
Douglas-Hamilton says elephants can bounce back if given the chance. Poaching reduced its savanna elephants from an estimated 40, in the s to about 6, in Today, elephant numbers in the park have rebounded to about 17,, a response to anti-poaching measures.
But accurate assessments - of populations, trends in their numbers and the threats they face - take many years. The situation differs from country to country. In Botswana, for example, it has been argued that there are so many elephants that the ecosystem cannot naturally support them. But, on a continent-wide scale, the giant mammals are in decline. Despite peaking in , poaching for ivory remained a "significant driver" of the decline, he told BBC News.
Where animals share that land, Dr Okita explained, it is important to use it in a way that is compatible for them. Isla Duporge from Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford, said: "While on the surface this looks bleak, the fact it's being flagged is actually positive.
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