Wildlife

Importance of Female Elephants in Social Structure

When older members of an elephant family are killed, younger female elephants assume the roles once held by their mothers, maintaining the networks that keep extended families together, a new study has found.

Over a 16-year period, researchers evaluated the changing social dynamics in groups of elephants in western Kenya as mature matriarchs were killed by poachers who hunt elephants for the ivory in their tusks. Not only did younger female elephants take up new social positions when an older matriarch died, but the links they forged with other elephant daughters mirrored connections once held by their mothers.

The scientists paid especially close attention to mother-daughter relationships. Female elephants are known to hold important leadership roles in elephant social groups, and the researchers were curious to discover how mother elephants might prepare young females to forge their own connections and assume adult social responsibilities.

But African elephants face a stress that can devastate even the strongest social networks: poaching. According to the World Wildlife Fund, tens of thousands of elephants are poached each year. African elephant numbers have plummeted from 5 million in the last century to an estimated 470,000 in 2015, with 40,000 killed in 2011 alone. Elephants' tusks — extended incisor teeth — are greatly prized for their ivory, and growing demand for ivory products in the Far East fuels the poaching, despite a 1990 global ban on international ivory sales, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

The bigger the tusks, the more valuable they are to poachers, so older elephants with the biggest tusks are poachers' favourite targets, the study reported. Older female elephants are also likely to occupy important roles within the "connectivity hub" of the group's social network, the scientists found. Poaching not only dramatically reduces elephant populations, but could also be destroying the bonds that hold groups together.

After 16 years, scientists reported that an estimated 70 percent of the individual elephants occupying important social roles in the group had been replaced. They found that they could predict which younger elephants would step into vacant roles, based on whose mother had previously held that position, establishing connections to other young elephants whose mothers had interacted closely with their own mother, even if these young elephants had not previously been seen to spend much time together.

Elephants' social flexibility in spite of poaching provides a ray of hope for the sustainability of their populations.

Wildlife

Poaching threatens Mali's rare desert elephants

About a fifth of Mali's rare desert elephants have been killed this year as ivory poachers exploit a security vacuum in the country's north, the United Nations said on Thursday.

At least 57 elephants died between January and June among the West African country's only herd of around 300 animals, the U.N. peacekeeping mission MINUSMA said in a statement.

"(The poached elephants) represent about 20 percent of the remaining (Malian) population and were killed in areas where insecurity is present," MINUSMA said, adding that forest rangers were frequently targeted by Islamist jihadists.

The WILD Foundation, which helps protect Mali's northern Gourma herd, estimates that around 90 of the mammals have been killed since late 2014.

Tens of thousands of elephants once roamed the savannahs stretching between West Africa's shores and the Nile basin but poaching and habitat loss have dramatically cut their numbers.

Roughly 7,000 animals are thought to remain in West and Central Africa, of which some are thought to be genetically distinct from the more numerous elephants further south. They are often scattered in small, isolated groups of less than 100 and are at risk of local extinction.

Mali's Gourma elephants, once a magnet for tourists visiting the nearby desert city of Timbuktu, are one of the last two desert herds in the world. The other is in Namibia.

The decline in Mali has accelerated in recent months because of rising insecurity and a decrease in army protection, according to Amy Lewis from WILD Foundation.

Armed groups drove the Malian army out of many posts in the country's north last year and are fighting amongst each other for control of land and trafficking corridors.

Wildlife

Elephant Tramples Poacher in Zimbabwe

In a grim karmic twist, a suspected poacher illegally hunting African elephants was trampled to death by his prey in Charara National Park near Lake Kariba in northwestern Zimbabwe.

Populations of forest elephants have plummeted by 62 percent over the past 10 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Wildlife

U.S. officials shift shipping lanes off California to reduce chance of collisions with slow-moving whales.

                       

 

 

 

 

 

 Express train kills herd of wild elephants in southeastern India. 

Wildlife

At least 19 elephants and two rhinos have died of thirst in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park.

The disappearance of nearly half of South Florida rabbit species' habitat due to rising sea levels illustrates the mounting dangers of climate change, according to researchers. The Lower Keys marsh rabbit was once abundant along the chain of islands between Miami and Key West. But aerial photos from 1958 to 2006 show that 48 percent of its habitat has been lost due to sea level rise. Only a few hundred of the species survive on a few of the keys.