AMARULA RESEARCH REVEALS FASCINATING ELEPHANT BEHAVIOUR

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AMARULA RESEARCH REVEALS FASCINATING ELEPHANT BEHAVIOUR

2013/11/05 04:04:22 PM

Dr Markus Hofmeyr (SANParks Head of Veterinary Services), Dr Danny Govender (SANParks), UKZN PhD Candidate Audrey Delsink and SANParks Helicopter Pilot Grant Knight with an immobilized Kruger elephant cow fitted with a GSM Telemetry Collar as part of the Amarula Elephant Research Programme.

Dr Markus Hofmeyr Ongoing research funded by the not-for-profit Amarula Trust explores elephant behaviour as the basis for developing conservation and elephant management strategies in public and private game parks.

Run by Professor Rob Slotow of the School of Life Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science, the Amarula Elephant Research Programme, or AERP as it is known, has been on the go since 2002.

With a team of researchers, PhD and MSc students, it involves Government conservation agencies and private game reserves, as well as ecologists, in generating elephant management plans based on data collected through scientific research.

To better understand their ranging behaviour, the AERP collars elephants it studies, using GPS devices that automatically record the location of each animal every 30 minutes. "This gives us an amazingly high resolution and accuracy of movements of elephants in real time. Using indices such as rate of movement, or even the frequency and angle of turning behaviour, we can discover how they are responding to local conditions," says Slotow.

He tells of how park and conservation managers were concerned that the impact of elephants on vegetation would be most concentrated in areas near fencing, with the potential to affect sustainability, particularly in smaller reserves.

"Our results indicated the opposite - that elephants move faster, and turn less often nearer fencing, and thus impact vegetation less. What was surprising was the distance elephants stay away from fences - up to about 2,5 km in the dry season and over 4 km in the wet season. This is probably because the elephants associate the boundary of the reserve with risk, and this means that the impacts of elephants may be more concentrated than previously thought.

"We have also found that when a reserve is increased in size by dropping a fence, it takes up to a year for the elephants to move past where the fence had been, and to use the new area. Female elephants especially are slower to move into new areas, probably because they are more sensitive to risk as far as the young animals in the herd are concerned." Like Humans, Elephants are susceptible to stress, and even within small reserves, elephants consider some parts a refuge from threat, and retreat there when their basal stress levels are higher. They have corridors between these areas, along with they travel faster than normal to get to the next refuge.

One of the programme's most exciting research projects has involved observing the response of elephants to recordings of lions roaring, he says. The study showed that young matriarchs under 40 years old responded more or less the same to the sound of male and female roars and also to recordings of one or more lion roaring at a time. Less discriminating than their elders, they typically under-reacted to male roars, despite the danger that they presented. Older, more experienced matriarchs of up to 60 years old and more, however, were more nuanced in their responses, reacting most strongly to the sound of multiple male roars. This is because they would not discern a single male or females to be particularly threatening but would find a group of male lions to represent far graver danger.

"This study provided the first empirical evidence that individuals within a social group may derive significant benefits from the influence of an older leader because of an enhanced ability to make crucial decisions about a predatory threat," he explains.

The programme has also been researching elephant response to seasonal changes and has observed that when the rains come, the collared females travel further and faster, whereas during the dry season, they are constrained by limited forage with the distances they cover being shorter and less variable.

Another study determined that elephants tend to turn more often in favourable habitat where there is a greater abundance of food and shade, than in a less hospitable environment. When they need to reach a destination quickly for water or to access mates, they also move faster and more directly, with fewer turns.

The Amarula Elephant Programme provides basic understanding, allowing an integrated approach to elephant conservation management. The nuances of behaviour, and understanding the context that influences important predictable responses, allows managers to better plan and intervene. For example, we know the value of older matriarchs in healthy and predictable behaviour be elephant, and so should avoid removing them from the system at all costs. We also know that some areas are perceived as refuges, and human use of these areas should be reduced to allow recovery from stress, and thus reduce the risks of an attack on people. We also need to plan carefully how we use fencing in the landscape.

The findings of the AERP play a key role in local elephant conservation strategies and have contributed to the development of elephant management plans in each of the country's public reserves, as required by the Department of Environmental Affairs. To date, three such plans, which incorporate the results and recommendations from the research, have been signed off by the National Government. All three are in KwaZulu-Natal. They are Tembe Elephant Park, Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park and Ithala Game Reserve.