Elephant welfare can be assessed using two indicators

APRIL 1, 2020

by University of Turku

Across the world, animals are kept in captivity for various reasons: in zoos for education and research, in research facilities for testing, on farms for meat and other products, and in people's homes as pets. Maintaining good animal welfare is not only important for ethical reasons; poor welfare can impact human wellbeing and the economy. But how do we assess how animals are feeling?

One way to assess animal wellbeing is to look at stress levels. Vets typically use two biological measures of stress: stress hormone levels and white blood cell ratios. In mammals—including humans—the most important stress hormone is cortisol. When animals are faced with danger, cortisol is produced to help prepare the body for a challenge. However, if high stress and cortisol are experienced constantly, they can impact an animal's health.

In addition to cortisol, scientists can also look at the ratio of two types of white blood cells, heterophils (or neutrophils) and lymphocytes. These cells play an important role in the immune system of mammals, and after animals have experienced a stressful event, their ratio is typically high.

Researchers at the University of Turku, Finland, wanted to find out if these two biological measures of stress were correlated and whether animals with high levels of cortisol also had a high heterophil to lymphocyte ratio. They measured cortisol and heterophil to lymphocyte ratios in 120 Asian elephants from a semi-captive population of working timber elephants in Myanmar. The researchers also weighed each elephant, as body weight is a good indicator of general health.

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Researchers study elephants' unique interactions with their dead

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

by Zoological Society of San Diego

Stories of unique and sentient interactions between elephants and their dead are a familiar part of the species' lore, but a comprehensive study of these interactions has been lacking—until now. A recent review of documented field observations of elephants at carcasses reveals patterns of elephants' behavior toward their dead, regardless of the strength of former relationships with the deceased individual.

The findings, published in the journal Primates, indicate that elephants exhibit a generalized interest in their dead, even after bodies have long decayed—and even if the elephants studied were not closely bonded to the dead individual. The most common behaviors observed were approaching the dead, touching and examining the carcass. Elephants also appeared to use their advanced sense of smell to identify dead individuals, and they were observed vocalizing and attempting to lift or pull fallen elephants that had just died.

The research was led by Shifra Goldenberg, Ph.D., from the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and George Wittemyer, Ph.D., from Save the Elephants and the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University. The project was funded by Save the Elephants, the National Science Foundation and Colorado State University.

The study consisted of a literature review of 32 original observations of wild elephant carcasses from 12 distinct sources across Africa. Despite variability across sources in methodology, some trends were apparent.

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More than 200 elephants in Zimbabwe die as drought crisis deepens

Parks agency plans to move hundreds of animals in ‘biggest translocation of wildlife in Zimbabwe’s history’

Hundreds of elephants and tens of lions in Zimbabwe will be moved by the country’s wildlife agency as part of a major operation to save the animals from a devastating drought.

More than 200 elephants have died over the last two months due to a lack of water at the country’s main conservation zones in Mana Pools and Hwange National Park.

Residents of Jutshume village, near to Hwange National Park, shared a video of an elephant calf that had fallen into a well last month after desperately searching for water. Residents managed to rescue the calf, which later fled into the wild, but believe its leg was broken in the process.

A second adult elephant, which had collapsed near to the village, was fed by residents until it was strong enough to walk.

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Namibia forced by drought to auction 1,000 wild animals

Southern African nation aiming to limit starvation and generate conservation funds

Agence France-Presse

Sun 16 Jun 2019 05.02 BST Last modified on Mon 17 Jun 2019 13.11 BST

Drought-hit Namibia has authorised the sale of at least 1,000 wild animals – including elephants and giraffes – to limit loss of life and generate US$1.1 million for conservation, the authorities confirmed Saturday.

“Given that this year is a drought year, the [environment] ministry would like to sell various type of game species from various protected areas to protect grazing and at the same time to also generate much needed funding for parks and wildlife management,” the environment ministry spokesman Romeo Muyunda said.

The authorities declared a national disaster last month, and the meteorological services in the southern African nation estimate that some parts of the country faced the deadliest drought in as many as 90 years.

“The grazing condition in most of our parks is extremely poor and if we do not reduce the number of animals, this will lead to loss of an animals due to starvation,” Muyunda said.

In April, an agriculture ministry report said 63,700 animals died in 2018 because of deteriorating grazing conditions brought on by dry weather.

Namibia’s cabinet announced this week that the government would sell about 1,000 wild animals.

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Three elephants found poisoned in Malaysia

JUNE 7, 2019

Three elephants were poisoned to death near a palm oil plantation in Malaysia, officials said Friday, in the latest case of the endangered creatures being killed near human settlements.

Local police in southern Johor state found the animal carcasses and alerted wildlife officers on Tuesday, Wildlife and National Parks Department director-general Abdul Kadir Abu Hashim told AFP.

The dead animals are believed to be part of a herd of 30 elephants from the nearby forest reserve.

"We conducted a post-mortem on the three female elephants aged between 18 and 22, and it revealed they were poisoned," Abdul Kadir said.

"I am shocked and saddened by this incident. If this trend continues, all our wild elephants will be wiped out."

Electric fences used to keep elephants away from village crops were not functioning and allowed the creatures to trespass on plantations, Abdul Kadir said.

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Botswana condemned for lifting ban on hunting elephants

Country with Africa’s largest elephant population says its growth is affecting farmers

Jason BurkeAfrica correspondent

Thu 23 May 2019 12.43 BSTFirst published on Thu 23 May 2019 09.33 BST

Conservationists have reacted with outrage and concern to a decision by Botswana to lift its ban on elephant hunting.

The southern African country said the move was justified by an increase in population and its impact on farmers’ livelihoods.

“The whole world is turning away from hunting. It is increasingly seen as an archaic practice. This is very, very damaging to the image of Botswana as a global leader in elephant conservation,” said Dr Paula Kahumbu, an expert and activist based in Kenya.

Others called the decision “disappointing”.

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Africa's elephant poaching rates in decline, but iconic animal still under threat

MAY 28, 2019

by University of York

Elephant poaching rates in Africa have started to decline after reaching a peak in 2011, an international team of scientists have concluded.

However, the team say the continent's elephant population remains threatened without continuing action to tackle poverty, reduce corruption and decrease demand of ivory.

The research, which included scientists from the universities of Freiburg, York and the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), reveals a decline in annual poaching mortality rate from an estimated peak of over 10 % in 2011 to less than 4 % in 2017.

It is estimated there are around 350,000 elephants left in Africa, but approximately 10-15,000 are killed each year by poachers.

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Stranded baby elephants rescued by Thai rangers

MARCH 30, 2019

The elephant calves were stuck in a muddy watering hole when they found by park rangers

Six baby elephants separated from their parents and trapped in a muddy pit for days have been rescued by park rangers in rural Thailand, officials said Saturday.

Patrolling rangers chanced upon the struggling herd in a national park east of Bangkok on Wednesday afternoon, park superintendent Prawatsart Chantheap told AFP.

Once the rangers realised the calves, aged between one and four years old, could not climb out of the dirty watering hole, some left the forest to bring back digging tools while others stayed overnight to keep watch over the frightened creatures.

"Our team arrived with hoes (on Thursday morning)... and we began to dig around the rim (of the mud pit) to make it less steep," he said.

After three hours of digging to build a makeshift ramp, the mud-covered babies managed to stumble out of the pit one-by-one as the rangers cheered them on.

"Go, go, follow each other!" the rangers yelled in a video recorded by the national parks department. "Go, children, go!"

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Technology is useful, but drones alone won't save Africa's elephants

February 18, 2019 by Ross Harvey, The Conversation

Technology has made a tremendous difference in the world, in areas as diverse as health and education, and pretty much everything in between.

But is technology the weapon that will ultimately eradicate animal poaching and save various species from eradication? It's not a silver bullet, but it certainly has potential. That's why Vulcan – a company started by the late Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft – has produced a tech platform called EarthRanger to monitor protected wildlife areas by drawing in big data from cameras, animal collars and vehicle sensors. Other platforms such as SMART – a spatial monitoring and reporting tool – have also started to gain traction and operate in similar ways to EarthRanger.

Vulcan is known in the conservation world for sponsoring the Great Elephant Census. The census revealed that there are probably fewer than 400 000 savannah elephants left in the wild across Africa. It also revealed a decline of 8% a year between 2007 and 2014, largely due to poaching, either to supply the illegal ivory trade or the bushmeat trade.

A census is useful because it provides a snapshot in time and highlights the urgency of the problem. Elephants are a keystone species, environmental engineers who play irreplaceable roles in maintaining ecological integrity. They're also incredibly intelligent. Losing them is not an option. But we need more than occasional snapshots to aid conservation efforts.

New technologies, however—as a step beyond census counting—are merely a tool. Their efficacy ultimately depends on the value to the end user. A sound overarching vision and buy-in from users on the ground is also critical. At present, data collection and analysis practices vary from site to site. Without best-practice standards in this respect, all the cleverly collected data in the world may make little difference.

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Change of teeth causes yo-yo effect in elephants' weight

Date:  January 9, 2019

Source:  University of Zurich

The teeth of most mammals, including humans, are only replaced once in a lifetime, when the milk teeth give way to the permanent teeth. This one change is enough to adapt to the increasing size of the jaw. But elephants increase greatly in size and weight over the course of their lives -- from a starting weight of 100 kilograms to several tons in adulthood. One single change of teeth would not be enough for the enormous growth of the jaw.

Elephants' teeth change five times

That's why the teeth of elephants are replaced a total of five times over their lifespan. On each side of the jaw they have only one single tooth in use at a time which is slowly pushed forwards by a new bigger tooth out of the mouth, breaking off in pieces. If you look inside an elephant's mouth you will see either only one single tooth or pieces of the old tooth behind which part of the new tooth is pushing through, a process that is called molar progression.

As a result of this process, the elephants' chewing surface gets bigger when two teeth are present on one side at the same time, and then smaller again when there is only one tooth on each side. For that reason there are times when it is easier for the animals to eat more or chew the same amount more finely, and hence increase the intake of digestible food.

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Edinburgh scientists discover mammoth secret in ivory DNA

By Kenneth Macdonald & Marc Ellison BBC Scotland

4 January 2019

Scientists based at Edinburgh Zoo are cooperating to create a genetics laboratory in Cambodia to fight the illegal ivory trade.

While trying to save elephants, they have found ivory from another animal that is now extinct.

In the WildGenes laboratory of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, Dr Alex Ball is drilling what sounds like a giant tooth.

Which is in effect what it is: an ornately carved elephant tusk.

The lab is working with three partners in a project funded by the UK government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Together they are building Cambodia's scientific capacity to preserve its wildlife and combat the ivory trade which passes through it.

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TEDWomen: Vibrations offer new way to track elephants

1 December 2018

Researchers have come up with a new way of tracking elephants, via the vibrations that the animals make.

Scientists Dr Beth Mortimer and Prof Tarje Nissen-Meyer discovered that elephants generate vibrations through their normal movements and through vocalisations, known as "rumbles".

These can be measured by techniques usually used for studying earthquakes.

The Oxford academics spoke about their research at the TEDWomen conference currently under way in California.

They explained how they measured the seismic waves that could travel nearly four miles through the ground.

They recorded the vibrations generated by wild elephants in Kenya while walking and calling, using instruments known as geophones.

Seismological modelling software that incorporates the local geological information was combined with computer algorithms to produce accurate estimates of the seismic waves produced by elephants.

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Botswana poaching spree sees 90 elephants killed in two months

Charities and ministers voice concern after discovery of carcasses with tusks hacked off

Agence France-Presse

Tue 4 Sep 2018 17.21 BSTLast modified on Tue 4 Sep 2018 18.07 BST

Ninety elephant carcasses have been found in Botswana with their tusks hacked off, in what is believed to be one of Africa’s worst mass poaching sprees.

Most of the animals killed were large bulls carrying heavy tusks, Elephants Without Borders said on Tuesday.

The discovery was made over several weeks during an aerial survey by scientists from Elephants Without Borders and Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks.

Mike Chase, the charity’s director, said: “We started flying the survey on 10 July, and we have counted 90 elephant carcasses since the survey commenced. Each day, we are counting dead elephants.”

The wild pachyderms were shot with heavy-calibre rifles at watering spots near a wildlife sanctuary in the Okavango Delta.

According to Chase, the carcasses’ skulls were “chopped open by presumably very sharp axes, to remove their tusks”. In some cases, the trunks were also removed.

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A portrait of ancient elephant-like mammals drawn from multiproxy analysis

September 3, 2018 by Christopher Packham, Phys.org report

Although world-famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes prided himself on his deductive prowess, in truth, a great many of his astounding observations resulted from inductive reasoning, by which he arrived at conclusions about events that he did not observe based on the evidence at hand. Similarly, biologists, ecologists and paleontologists strive to describe the world that existed before humans could observe or record it, based only on fossil information. Via induction, they attempt to reconstruct the prevailing climate during biological epochs, the dietary habits and behaviors of extinct animals, and the lineages of creatures for which sparse fossil evidence is available.

When Holmes examines the scene of a crime, he observes everything around him to collect multiple data points from which to draw conclusions. Modern paleontology might describe this as a multiproxy methodology, in which the analysis is complemented by multiple sources of information. A recent multiproxy analysis by an international collaborative of researchers has produced a vivid picture of the dietary habits of extinct proboscideans in Central Chile, thereby also informing a picture of South American microclimates that Holmes might approve of.

Gompotheres were elephant-like mammals that lived 12 to 1.6 million years ago during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs. Chilean gompotheres were the only group of proboscideans to reach South America, and survived to the end of the Pleistocene. Biologists refer to gompotheres as "ecosystem engineers," animals that significantly modify their habitats. They strongly affect species richness and geographic heterogeneity within their domains.

Paleontologists have recognized an array of dietary categories based on the dental morphology evidenced in fossils, including browsing, grazing and mixed feeding. However, because dietary patterns are strongly influenced by the environment, dental morphology alone may not provide enough evidence to draw conclusions about dietary habits. For the current study, the researchers analyzed multiple points of evidence to determine the diets of Chilean gompotheres, including stable isotopes, dental microwear, and dental calculus microfossils derived from molar fossils found at 30 Late Pleistocene sites.

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Capturing elephants from the wild shortens their lives

Date:  August 7, 2018

Source:  University of Turku

Summary:

Humans have been capturing wild Asian elephants for more than 3,000 years, and this still continues today despite the fact that the populations are declining. An international team of researchers has now analysed records of timber elephants in Myanmar to understand the effects of capture. The study shows that even years after their capture, wild-caught elephants' mortality rate remains increased, and their average life expectancy is several years shorter compared to captive-born animals.

Millions of wild animals are captured alive each year for a diverse range of purposes. While members of some species can thrive in captivity and are healthier, live longer, and produce more offspring than their free-living counterparts, many others perform far worse. Elephants, for example, are known to be at a much higher risk of dying when captive in zoos compared to living in the wild. Comparisons like these, however, mainly illustrate the differences in the diet, social environment, exercise possibilities, and disease patterns between zoos and wild environments. They provide little insight to how the capture of wild elephants might affect their long-term well-being in captivity.

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Fatal elephant attacks on Rohingya refugees push Bangladesh to act

Young boy becomes latest in series of casualties at Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar, which lies on migration route long used by elephants

Karen McVeighand Dinakar Peri

Wed 9 May 2018 14.07 BSTLast modified on Wed 9 May 2018 17.26 BST

Bangaldesh has pledged to step up its response to a series of deadly elephant attacks at a refugee camp housing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees after a 12-year-old boy was trampled to death.

Shamsu Uddin died instantly when an elephant attacked him after he had fallen asleep while guarding paddy fields with friends in Uttar Shilkhali village in the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar.

Three days later, a young girl was critically injured when elephants attacked Nayapara refugee camp, to the south of Cox’s Bazar.

Both attacks occurred outside Kutupalong, temporary home to 700,000 Rohingya refugees. The rising number of fatal elephant attacks – at least a dozen in the six months from October 2017 – tell a wider, tragic story of how deforestation, monsoons and the refugee crisis have left some of the world’s most vulnerable people at the mercy of wild animals.

Crowded together on a bare hillside at the mercy of the approaching rainy season, residents of the sprawling Kutupalong camp – mainly Rohingya muslims who have fled a brutal campaign of violence in Myanmar in August – already live in difficult conditions. But it also sits on several important migration corridorsbetween Myanmar and Bangladesh that elephants have used for centuries.

This year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) began a programme to raise awareness, setting up 56 watchtowers and 30 volunteer elephant response teams to warn residents when elephants enter the camp. As part of the initiative, people are made aware of what they should do if they encounter an elephant.

Read on 

Could seismology equipment help to protect elephants from poachers?

Date: May 7, 2018

Source: Cell Press

Summary:

Using tools developed to monitor earthquakes, an interdisciplinary team of researchers have found that it's possible to eavesdrop on elephants by listening in to vibrations through the ground as they move about and vocalize. The findings support theories that elephants use ground vibrations for long-distance communication among themselves. They might also lead a new kind of alarm system for detecting elephant behaviors, such as panic running.

Read on 

Elephant declines imperil Africa's forests

As elephant populations shrink, forest composition and structure will undergo dramatic change

Date:  March 12, 2018

Source:  Duke University

Summary:

Poaching and habitat loss have reduced forest elephant populations in Central Africa by 63 percent since 2001. This poses consequences not only for elephants but also for the region's forests, a new study finds. Without intervention to stop poaching, as much as 96 percent of Central Africa's forests will undergo major changes in tree-species composition and structure as local populations of elephants disappear and surviving populations are crowded into ever-smaller forest remnants.

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Complete genomes of extinct and living elephants sequenced

Findings point to highly complex relationships

Date:  February 26, 2018

Source:  McMaster University

Summary:

Researchers have produced one of the most comprehensive evolutionary pictures to date by looking at one of the world's most iconic animal families - namely elephants, and their relatives mammoths and mastodons-spanning millions of years.

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Wild Sri Lankan elephants retreat from sound of disturbed Asian honey bees

Date:  January 22, 2018

Source:  University of Oxford

Summary:

A new study using playbacks, has for the first time shown that Asian elephants in Sri Lanka are scared of honey bees, much like their African counterparts. The study showed that Asian elephants responded with alarm to the bee simulations. They also retreated significantly further away and vocalized more in response to the bee sounds compared to controls.

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