Elephant Management and Poaching in African Countries

[Richprins]

Africa!

[Lisbeth]

Namibia: Concern for elephants in Okavango Basin grows

BY ARLANA SHIKONGO - 27TH APRIL 2021 - THE NAMIBIAN

Interested and affected parties in the oil exploration activities in the Okavango Basin are deeply concerned about the impacts of potential 2D seismic surveying to be undertaken in the area on wildlife, particularly elephants.

Stakeholders, who have long been against the ongoing oil and gas exploration activities by Canadian company Reconnaissance Africa (Recon), have submitted objections to Recon’s application to perform 2D seismic surveys in the area.

This is detailed in several submissions by various environmental groups who shared concerns about the environmental impact assessment (EIA) and environmental management plan (EMP) submitted by Recon for their application.

They are also concerned that Recon’s recent announcement about the discovery of a working conventional petroleum system in the basin at their first drill site will give government impetus to issue the necessary licensing without fully considering the objections.

Saving Okavango’s Unique Life (SOUL), an alliance of civil society organisations and activists who promote environmental justice, believes the call for public comment was merely a facade by the government to feign inclusivity where a decision has already been taken.

This is largely because the window for public comment was initially eight days and was slated to close on 9 April. The period for public comment was since extended to 23 April [today].

“There’s concern this is a compromised process and we are appealing for a reasonable extension, because a mere eight working days’ public consultation is a bit of a sham.

“There is also fear that by partaking, it is potentially legitimising a process which already has a predetermined outcome,” said Veruschka Dumeni of Friday’s for Future Windhoek (FFFW), a member organisation of SOUL, prior to the deadline extension.

Furthermore, citing a 2015 study by the Wildlife Conservation Society of Uganda which showed that elephants are negatively affected by seismic surveys, the coalition fears that the long lasting impacts on one of the continent’s most intact African elephant populations have not adequately been assessed.

According to the study, elephant behaviour, movement, migratory patterns and home ranges were all adversely impacted by oil developments in Uganda.

Speaking to The Namibian, the president and co-founder of The Global March for Elephants and Rhinos, Rosemary Alles, said oil exploration activities will likely cause a great disruption to elephant populations as the clearing of area and creation of roads creates access to areas uninhabited by humans.

“After Covid-19, one of our primary responsibilities should be to leave wildlife places in-tact, to not disrupt them, to not create roads into them where more poaching can happen, where more pathogens can evolve, where more spillover incidents can occur and set the stage for extinction,” she said.

Alles, who has closely studied and worked on the conservation of elephant populations for a number of years, added that elephants are highly sensitive to sound, thus increased movement in their uninhabited areas could force them closer to areas inhabited by humans.

“This is the way they communicate through infrasound. So when they detect human activity, being that they are highly sentient, intelligent, social animals, there is potential for them to move away from the area to find different migratory routes.

“Those other migratory routes may lead them closer to human habitat and that could lead to human-elephant conflict and both for elephants and humans it could be a fatal result of the drilling,” she added.

Concern for these elephant populations has deepened as the International Union for Conservation of Nature recently included African elephants as endangered on their Red List of Threatened Species, which is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of extinction risk animals.

This is the first time the IUCN has listed the two African elephant species separately, giving each its own unique listing. Prior to this, African elephants were treated as a single species listed as vulnerable.

“Following population declines over several decades due to poaching for ivory and loss of habitat, the African forest elephant is now listed as critically endangered and the African savannah elephant as endangered […]

“This is the first time the two species have been assessed separately for the IUCN Red List following the emergency of new genetic evidence,” IUCN announced last month.

The concerned environmental groups feel it is more important now more than ever to ensure the protection of the large mammal and take into consideration the effect oil exploration activities will have on their populations and habitats in southern Africa.

https://www.namibian.com.na/101068/read ... asin-grows

[Richprins]

[Lisbeth]

Zimbabwe Considers Mass Elephant Killing, First Time Since 1988

By Bloomberg• 5 May 2021

Zimbabwe is considering the mass killing of elephants, known as culling, for the first time since 1988 to reduce the 100,000 strong population of the animals.

By Ray Ndlovu - May 5, 2021, 6:07 PM – Updated on May 5, 2021, 8:57 PM

The government of Zimbabwe, which has the world’s second-largest population of elephants after neighboring Botswana, maintains that the large number of the animals is leading to destruction of habitat needed by other species and an increasing number of dangerous human-elephant interactions. Adult elephants can eat 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of vegetation a day and often strip bark from trees, killing them.

“We are trying to see ways in which we can reduce the numbers. We have to discuss it at policy level as government,” Mangaliso Ndlovu, the Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Minister, said Wednesday in an interview carried by the state-controlled Zimpapers Television Network. “Options are on the table, including culling.” No further details were given.

While elephant numbers have fallen in total over the last few decades, Southern African nations, including Zimbabwe, have seen their populations of the animals rise. While culling has been avoided across the region after protests from environmental activists, Botswana and Zimbabwe have in recent years asserted the right to manage their elephant numbers as they see fit.

50,000 Culled

“It’s an option but not a decision yet,” Ndlovu said by text message. “We will obviously rely on scientific advice.”

The southern African nation is undergoing a review of its Parks and Wildlife Act to collate views on how to better manage its wildlife resources.

Zimbabwe killed more than 50,000 elephants when it carried out culling on five occasions between 1965 and 1988, according to the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority.

Uganda, Zambia and South Africa have also culled elephants in the past.

When elephants are culled family groups, or herds, are shot in their entirety to prevent post traumatic stress for surviving animals.

“The only way to manage elephant populations by culling is to take out entire herds,” said Rob Lurie, chairman of the Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association. “It’s not an easy task and would require a lot of manpower and financing to be done correctly.”

Other methods of population control include contraception and translocation.

[Richprins]

[Lisbeth]

World Elephant Day: How are the pachyderms doing in Africa?

By Don Pinnock• 11 August 2021


(Photo: Supplied)

The title of the book I compiled with Colin Bell, ‘The Last Elephants’, was less predictive than a warning — elephants on the continent were in big trouble, with populations plummeting. Two years later it was time to see how they were doing

The state of elephants in Africa is in some measure good and in large measure bad. In a number of cases it’s downright ugly. Savannah elephants have recently been listed as endangered and forest elephants as critically endangered, so their future is a concern.

So how are they doing? Here’s the backdrop: From roughly a million in 1970, Africa’s elephant population plummeted to around 450,000 at last count — a decline largely blamed on poaching for their ivory. At its height in 2011, poaching claimed 36,000 elephants a year, or an average of one every 15 minutes.

And looming like an approaching thunderstorm is the number of people living in Africa, which has doubled since 1982, reaching a billion in 2009, and expected to double again by 2050. Increasing conflict with elephants will be inevitable.

The “good” today is in South Africa and Kenya as well as, surprisingly, Mali and Chad. The “bad” is almost everywhere else and, sadly, includes the country with the greatest herd: Botswana. The ugly is where it always seems to be for elephants: Zimbabwe.

Here’s the good news

At the moment elephant numbers in southern Africa seem to be relatively stable. In South Africa there are around 26,000 and in northern Botswana the population has remained at around 130,000 for more than a decade. In Kenya, according to conservationist Karl Ammann, elephant numbers are gradually increasing — but so is conflict with farmers.

In June, South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy tabled a policy saying the government would not support the international sale of ivory at CITES “as long as current specified circumstances prevail”. It’s draft policy and not yet law, but is encouraging.

Chad’s elephants continue to thrive thanks to the pioneering work done by African Parks Network operating in tandem with the government of Chad in Zakouma National Park. Kenya, too, has made great progress to reduce elephant poaching by close to 90% over the past decade through better law enforcement, ensuring that elephants are positioned as an asset both for the country and for their people.

Another “good” is Mali, a place so often in turmoil it’s a surprise. The country has just experienced its second coup in nine months. Northern Mali is the transit route for huge numbers of migrants making their way northward to Europe and a major conduit for illegal drugs, weapons and jihadists.

Amid this, the Mali Elephant Project, engaging with local communities to protect desert-adapted elephants, is remarkably successful. There has been almost zero poaching and the government has approved a large extension to the Gourma Elephant Reserve. For nine years, MEP staff have been operating in a country slipping in and out of chaos and keeping elephants safe through it all. They’re hardy protectors.

Here’s the bad news

Perhaps anticipating SA’s CITES pullback, tourism ministers from Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia and Botswana met in June and, according to reports, discussed pulling out of CITES and possibly establishing an agreement similar to the Kimberley Process for diamonds, which requires transparency only between partners.


(Photo: Supplied)

Would it work for elephants? Given that a UN organisation like CITES can’t stop abuses of wildlife, it’s hard to imagine how a small side organisation could do any better. But it signals a strong desire to sell ivory and export elephants into captivity in defiance of CITES bans.

Zimbabwe, in terms of elephant conservation, is seldom good news. Transparency International rates it among the top 12 most corrupt countries in Africa and wildlife is a way to make money for those in power (and nobody else). China appears to be a ready customer.

In 2018 information leaked that elephant herds in Hwange National Park were being panicked by helicopters and trucks. Youngsters left behind were captured, penned at the park and sold to China. Then in 2019 CITES slammed the door on live elephant exports, which explains Zimbabwe’s keenness to pull out of the organisation.

In May, Environment Minister Mangaliso Ndlovu said in an interview on Zimpapers Television Network that culling was on the table. There’s a history. Between 1965 and 1988, Zimbabwe killed more than 50,000 elephants in five culling events. The standard reasons now are “too many elephants” and human-elephant conflict. Zimbabwe has an estimated population of 82,000 elephants. A 2016 census found the population down by 6% overall, but massively down in some regions like Sebungwe.

The export of elephants seems to also be on the cards. The conservation NGO Advocates4Earth applied for an interdict last month to prevent the export they said was imminent. Zimbabwe Wildlife Authority spokesperson Tinashe Farawo denied it was planning to export elephants. However, Zimbabwe has a record of exporting baby elephants in the face of international opprobrium.

Elephant specialist Sharon Pincott, who worked in Hwange for many years, said the culling announcement was probably a ploy. “There were articles saying they were considering culling. Next they were going to increase sport-hunting quotas… ZimParks just putting it out there. That was probably so we would all now say ‘well, maybe capturing a few youngsters isn’t so bad’. That’s how they think. And every single time they’ve lied and denied that they’re capturing.”

In Tanzania, the Selous Game Reserve is no more. What was the greatest wilderness in Africa in terms of size has been carved up to make way for mines, communities, a giant logging operation and a new hydro-electric dam that is currently being built at Stiegler’s Gorge in the very heart of the boundaries of the old reserve.

There are no recent population counts to check elephant numbers in Tanzania’s two new smaller parks, though it cannot be good since poaching remains high.

Botswana, once the darling of wildlife conservation, is using human-animal conflict and “overpopulation” to justify overturning its moratorium on trophy hunting. It’s an argument that’s been rubbished by conservationists. With 30% of all remaining African savannah elephants being in Botswana, the future of elephants in Africa depends on what happens there.

For 2021, a hunting quota of 287 elephants has been set, divided between foreigners and local citizens (who sometimes sell to foreigners). The real problems are twofold: unsustainable quotas plus increasing human population and development in wildlife ranges.

When hunting starts, elephants move and this can lead to conflict with villagers and farmers. Dr Mike Chase of Elephants Without Borders (EWB) says trophy hunting doesn’t solve human-animal conflict.

“Hunters seek our trophy-quality elephant bulls carrying tusks that weigh about 60lbs a side. They enter this tusk size at about 40 years old. In Botswana, these older bulls are unlikely to be those responsible for crop-raiding. Trophy hunters are unlikely to pay a large sum of money to hunt a younger ‘problem’ elephant with small tusks.”

Shooting 287 elephants a year may sound like a blip out of a total population of 130,000, but there’s a real concern that it will reduce big tuskers in concessions that have quotas as high as 12 elephants to hunt each year.

“Old bulls suppress problem behaviour in young bulls,” says Chase, “so diminishing their numbers through unsustainable hunting quotas could increase the elephant problem for farmers. EWB works directly with farmers, which has resulted in positive results for both elephants and people.”

Dr Audrey Delsink of Humane Society International-Africa agrees. “Targeting older elephants is extremely detrimental to the population because both sexes provide critically important ecological and social knowledge. They aid in the survival of the entire group. Only 39% of males survive to the age of first musth, so excessive hunting of bulls has severe consequences for the demographics of a bull population.”

Is hunting good for conservation? According to conservationist Pieter Kat, very little revenue from hunts gets back to communities. “No hunting operator in Botswana discloses their profits,” he says, “and none state clearly how their trophy hunting benefits the conservation of the species.”

Another problem has been the insufficiently and unscientifically explained die-off of hundreds of elephants near Seronga — the largest ever reported anywhere.

In Namibia, there’s an argument about elephant numbers. In a recent aerial transect survey, Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism estimated Namibia’s elephant population at between 16,000 and 24,000 and says numbers are increasing.

Veteran environmental journalist John Grobler, who regularly travels through the areas surveyed, disagrees. “Elephant counts are always done by the same, small, NGO-funded group. Their methodology and the results are so far removed from reality they could be talking about a different country.

“To have increased by 9,000 elephants between 1995 and 2004 would require a growth rate of 9.9% — three times the claimed average growth rate. Were some elephant cows having twins or what? Are they counting ghost herds? The official figure is so improbable as to be impossible. There are likely no more than 6,000 elephants left in Namibia — if we’re lucky.” So who’s correct?

In Central Africa, forest elephants are fighting for survival because their tusks are harder and in high demand. According to Lee White, Gabon’s Minister of Forests, Oceans, Environment and Climate Change, from 2006, when poachers began targeting this separate species, Africa’s rainforest states lost 75% of all forest elephants in the following 15 years — more than 95% of those in Democratic Republic of the Congo and 90% in Cameroon. Gabon lost 25,000 elephants to transnational organised crime.

What’s to be done?

Overall, elephants in Africa are caught in an ever-tightening triangle of tribulation: poaching, trophy hunting and habitat loss, all of it caused by human encroachment and greed in rangelands they have traversed peacefully for millions of years.

While human penetration into wildlife ranges is generally pictured as farmers and fields, possibly greater habitat danger comes from commercial land grabs. An example is the vast oil prospecting project by a Canadian company, ReconAfrica, in the Kavango Basin close to the home range of the world’s greatest concentration of elephants. The company says it aims “to develop an area roughly the size of Belgium into an oil field”.

“While the world slowly but surely turns away from fossil fuels in a bid to address climate change,” said Rachel Mackenna of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), “ReconAfrica’s pushing for oil and gas — and possibly fracking — in one of the world’s last remaining wilderness areas. It’s a disturbing illustration of how unsustainable extractive projects can undermine the survival of an entire ecosystem.”


‘The Last Elephants’ by Don Pinnock and Colin Bell, with a foreword by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

ReconAfrica’s plans for the Kavango Basin have the full support of Namibian President Hage Geingob. On 10 August he met with Craig Steinke, co-founder of Renaissance Oil Corporation, ReconAfrica’s parent company, at State House in Windhoek. Geingob said the project would bring much-needed jobs to the region.

Meanwhile, EIA is concerned that if Botswana grants permits to ReconAfrica, the country’s rising levels of poaching will be further exacerbated by the opening of wilderness areas to human industrial activity.

Other “land grabs” besides the vast Stiegler’s Gorge hydropower dam project mentioned earlier are China’s financing of four large dams on the Donga River in Nigeria, threatening the already highly endangered forest biomes and nearby reserves. It’s also funding the construction of a dam on Angola’s Cuanza River, which could destroy the species-rich floodplain and threaten water supply in two national parks.

“We could be losing elephants in the wild,” warns Dr Marion Garai of the Elephant Reintegration Trust. Research has shown that high volume, invasive tourism creates chronic stress in elephants, with higher cortisol levels, which can weaken the immune system.

“Our wind turbines, oil drilling and other underground or underwater technology are having a negative effect on the communication system of animals that ‘talk’ through seismic waves, such as elephants. Translocations, fences and other management interventions are creating social disruptions and severing ties of larger social networks.

“There are several predictions that estimate elephants and other large mammals will go extinct in the wild within the next 30-50 years if the situation is not abated. Human-wildlife conflicts are the greatest threat to their survival.”

Dr Delsink is equally concerned: “Elephants are one of the top three species killed as an assumed ‘problem animal’. All too often they’re destroyed as the first line of defence, which doesn’t sort the root of the problem. If strategies fail, we think it is a ‘problem elephant’, when it’s normally a problem of bad planning. We need to focus on co-existence rather than conflict and we need innovative, practical and cost-effective solutions.

“With 76% of elephant populations spread across one or more national borders, management actions taken at the incorrect scale can have massive consequences and ripple effects that extend far beyond the targeted zone, area or population. So country-level management choices could have devastating consequences for transient elephants.”

For Dr Michelle Henley of Elephants Alive, it’s worth asking the elephants: “We’ve discovered that pathfinding bulls are forging vital corridors through human-dominated landscapes from the Kruger National Park towards the Futi corridor in Mozambique.

“Allowing elephants to highlight migration routes provides an outlet for local high densities which in turn maintains the biodiversity objectives of protected areas and ensures genetic diversity across the wider elephant population. We should follow their lead.”

One of the great hopes for the survival of elephants in the long term is the KAZA project, a joint five-country initiative that is mandated to open up viable and practical elephant corridors. This would allow some of Botswana’s elephant herds to migrate unhindered northwards into the vast open spaces of southern Angola and Zambia where food is in abundance.

Sadly, KAZA seems to be merely another great initiative on paper that creates wonderful maps and Powerpoint presentations with little real action on the ground. But we can hope.

So to wrap up: in most places elephants are worse off now than two years ago, despite some population increases. Conflict is not the result of too many of them encroaching on human land, but rather humans increasingly invading theirs. Humans are voracious land-grabbers. Around 62% of the African continent is elephant habitat, but they are able to use only 17% of it.

“How much longer can elephants withstand the impact of our burgeoning human species?” asks Garai. The answer may be — unless there’s coordinated commitment across Africa’s range states — not for too long. DM/OBP

[Richprins]

[Lisbeth]

Poaching and tuskless elephants – the scientific confirmation

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Team Africa Geographic in the DECODING SCIENCE post series.



Research has confirmed what many experts have been suggesting for decades: ivory poaching selectively drives the evolution of tuskless elephants. The new study, published in Science, methodically demonstrates the devastating effects of poaching on the elephants in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. In essence, the article confirms that elephants had been “genetically engineered” to be born without tusks.

During the Mozambican Civil War from 1977 to 1992, the elephants of Gorongosa National Park and the rest of the country were indiscriminately poached. Ivory sales were used to fund weapons for armed forces on both sides, and the wholesale slaughter resulted in the loss of around 90% of the region’s elephants. Tuskless individuals (of no interest to ivory poachers) were more likely to survive and began to pass their genes on to their offspring as the park stabilised.

Intensive poaching in Africa has long been associated with increasing numbers of tuskless elephants. However, prior to this paper, no research had quantified the phenomenon, and the exact mechanisms behind the tuskless characteristic had not been investigated.

Researchers compared historical video footage and contemporary records to demonstrate that the frequency of tuskless females in Gorongosa increased nearly threefold from 18.5% to 50.9% over 28 years. To test whether or not this was due to a chance event and a population bottleneck, they used a simulation based on the assumption that tusked and tuskless females were equally likely to survive. The outcome of the simulation concluded that this was extremely unlikely to have occurred due to chance. Instead, the authors calculated that the survival chances of tuskless females were five times those of tusked females during the war.


Tuskless elephant cows are common in Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa

Tuskless elephants are found in most (if not all) savanna elephant populations, always in small proportions under natural conditions and, importantly, almost always in females. So, the next step for the researchers was to examine the genetic basis of the trait and the effect of selection on future generations. The proportion of tuskless elephants in Gorongosa (a total population of around 700) has remained significantly elevated long after the war. This shows that the trait is clearly heritable and an evolutionary response to poaching-induced selection.

Further investigation revealed that the gene for tuskless elephants is likely dominant, sex-linked (on the X chromosome) and male-lethal. Simply translated, this means that the mother will pass the gene to some, if not all, of her daughters, and it will be expressed in their phenotype (physical appearance). The fact that it is male-lethal means that male zygotes that inherit an X-chromosome with the gene will not be viable and will not develop to term. Consequently, the long-term prevalence of the tuskless gene could potentially skew the sex ratio of an elephant population.

The genetics are complicated slightly because some of the females express a mid-way phenotype, with only one tusk. It would be overly simple to expect that a complex trait like tusk growth to be controlled only by the complete dominance of one gene. It is highly likely that genes on other chromosomes also have an effect. The researchers believe that they have identified at least one X-linked gene (AMELX) and one autosomal gene (MEP1a) behind the genetic selection in Gorongosa, but further research is needed. They also point out that there are some anecdotal reports of tuskless male savanna elephants. While this is likely due to injury or observer error, they cannot rule out alternative genetic mechanisms that may play a role.

Every organism alive today has at least partly evolved due to “standing genetic variation”, where some individuals in a population possess a different type of gene that confers a distinct physical trait. Under certain environmental conditions, this characteristic may be disadvantageous (as in the case of tuskless elephants in protected areas), but a change in circumstances may come to favour the alternative form. In this case, rampant poaching has driven the selection of the tuskless genotype in the space of a generation.

The authors conclude that their research “shows how a sudden pulse of civil unrest can cause abrupt and persistent evolutionary shifts in long-lived animals even amid extreme population decline”. Though tuskless elephants can survive and thrive without them, tusks are multipurpose tools used in ways that shape the environment around them. A massive increase in the number of tuskless elephants could have substantial and unforeseen impacts on local ecosystems. Fortunately, the researchers believe that if Gorongosa National Park continues its phenomenal recovery, this process will abate.

Resources
The full paper can be accessed here: “Ivory poaching and the rapid evolution of tusklessness in African elephants”, Campbell-Staton, S., et al. (2021), Science

[Lisbeth]

The march of Malawi’s elephants – 263 elephants translocated to Kasungu

https://youtu.be/gfOAgGcH-M0

See more here.

[Richprins]

We also have plenty to spare!