Africa Wild

Elephant contraception to control a booming population in South Africa? http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/el ... on.html#cr

Balancing nature: African elephant contraception
November 2012. Poaching levels of the African Elephant are as high as they have ever been. The New York Times & Wildlife Extra reported that the amount of illegal ivory seized in 2011 was the highest recorded since international monitors began keeping statistics in 2002. Wildlife conservationists across Africa are fighting for the survival of these gentle giants, yet in South Africa, many parks face a different challenge: that of overpopulation.

Over population in South Africa
Growing numbers of elephants within fenced game reserves significantly deplete natural resources. This has led to ongoing debates as to how to manage the balancing act between the livelihood of elephants and that of other species, essentially seeking to control their growing numbers and decrease rapid habitat destruction.

Culling or contraception
The South African government controversially decided to allow elephant culling to control the rapidly growing population in 2008. However, many private parks and reserves decided to investigate and implement contraception as a preferred alternative. One such reserve is &Beyond Phinda Private Game Reserve, located in KwaZulu Natal.

58 elephants introduced in 1994 - Numbers doubled in 10 years
Phinda is a well-known success story in terms of animal relocation; the Zulu word Phinda meaning "The Return". A total of 58 elephants were introduced as young animals from Zimbabwe and Kruger culling operations in 1994. The number of elephants on Phinda almost doubled within only 10 years and as a result Phinda decided to embark on an experimental elephant contraception programme in May 2004.



Immunocontraception has been implemented on a rotational basis at Phinda to allow all females to calve. Photo credit Penny Parker

The Immunocontraception Program (ICP) involves the use of a drug called PZP. Once the drug is administered to a female elephant it stops the sperm from binding to her egg during ovulation, effectively preventing fetilisation and pregnancy.
Safe, reversible and effective
The Phinda team has been monitoring the programme for nearly 10 years. The contraception has been reported as safe, reversible and effective and a feasible means of population control, especially in enclosed conservation areas. The ICP has halved population growth rates compared to the projections without contraception. The long-term effects of the PZP hormone on female fertility are still being researched at Phinda.

Concerns have been raised about the negative effects of contraception on group behaviour such as its influence on allo-mothering - the combined mothering effort of a herd's females on all of the calves. Immunocontraception has been implemented on a rotational basis at Phinda to allow all females to calve. This eliminates the need for irreversible contraception, which is more likely to have a greater effect on the social behaviour of the herd.

Phinda Private Game Reserve is part of a collection of conservation focused private game reserves in Africa called the Open Africa Safari Collection. All of the reserves and safari lodges endorsed by Open Africa are committed to the conservation of African wildlife and their natural habitats, particularly endangered species. Open Africa and its partners are also committed to sustainable community upliftment as well as minimizing the ecological footprint and environmental impact of their operations.

For more information on other conservation initiatives at &Beyond Phinda Private Game Reserve click here. The reserve welcomes visitors and conservation volunteers who are particularly interested in elephant contraception.

The Kruger Park’s jumbo jigsaw puzzle

12:00 (GMT+2), Wed, 06 March 2013

Ron Thomson, conservationist, hunter, former game warden and author, takes aim at the Kruger’s no-cull elephant management strategy. The plan, he argues, is not only inhumane, but a sure way to destroy the park’s biodiversity.

According to research by SANParks, elephants have reduced the numbers of top canopy trees in the Kruger National Park by more than 95% since 1960, and this figure increases annually. But the scientists who are now dictating the elephant management programme in the Kruger argue that the perception this statement projects is false. They say that the situation is far more complex.

They are right, of course, but there can be little doubt that the park’s excessive elephant population over the last 50 or so years has been the primary cause of top canopy tree destruction, and the current ‘non-intervention’ (no culling) management programme is seriously exacerbating the problem. The five scientists responsible for the ‘non-intervention’ policy state: “Society must ultimately judge the balance between local disappearance of some rare plants or the loss of a more substantial component of ecosystem diversity, and the lives of the elephants killed to prevent this loss.”

This is a highly unscientific and problematic statement. How is ‘society’ meant to make a judgement on this issue when 99% of people have had no training in the science of wildlife management? All too often, members of the public and animal rights NGOs make demands based on emotion rather than considering the outcome carefully. Let’s take a closer look at the situation.

Compromise
Elephants became a permanent feature in the Kruger only towards the end of the 19th century. The numbers of top canopy trees and hence the nature of the park’s woodlands and riverine forests were thus established under an ecological regime that excluded elephants. The arrival of elephants, however, had no serious effect on the vegetation until their numbers started to explode during the mid-20th century. Since then, their impact has been dramatic.

If we want to have elephants in the Kruger – and surely everyone does – we have to agree on a compromise between the number of top canopy trees and the number of elephants. The current management regime in the Kruger favours the development of an ecosystem in which the number of big trees is seemingly unimportant, while a stable elephant population, without the need for culling, is paramount. It is this attitude that is responsible for the massive destruction of top canopy trees.

And here is the irony: this approach aimed at protecting the elephant is condemning hundreds of calves to death through agonising starvation as the vegetation diminishes. Despite the programme’s obvious cruelty, I am far more concerned about something else: its effect on the long-term biological diversity of the park. Maintaining biodiversity is surely the most important aim of our work in the Kruger, and it is being ignored by the very people who should be most concerned about it.

Complexity
Top canopy trees are the largest trees in a woodland. Beneath their foliage lies a microclimate of dappled sun and shade. This creates cooler, wetter conditions, vital for second-storey plants – some of which are small trees. Together, these layers create yet another microclimate lower down, where there is even less light, and conditions are cooler and wetter yet. And so on towards ground level.

Thousands of species of animals – including birds, snakes, lizards, insects, spiders, slugs and snails – have adapted to these specialised shade habitats. The diversity of plants is no less impressive, and the food webs are breathtaking in their complexity. It is here where the bushbuck and nyala live; where the tiny Livingstone’s suni survives; where pythons, puffadders, chameleons and other reptiles thrive; where monkeys, squirrels and bushbabies abound; and where specialised bird species such as robins and twin-spots fossick for food in the under-storey plants and leaf litter on the ground.

Some animals, by contrast, are totally arboreal and require continuous canopy tree-tops in which to survive. In such pristine habitats, the vast majority of raindrops strike leaves, twigs or the carpet of dead leaves rather than falling directly on the ground. Consequently, soil erosion is rare and practically every raindrop is absorbed and soaks into the ground. Under these ideal conditions, the death of a top canopy tree creates a gap that allows sunlight to penetrate closer to the ground.

Those plant species that cannot tolerate these conditions perish, and with them so do many organisms that depend on those plants. The extra sunlight, however, promotes an environment that encourages the growth of new saplings. In time, some of these become the new top canopy trees, and so the system recovers. The problem is that over the last 50 years, more than 95% of the park’s top canopy trees have been removed by elephants.

And because they have disappeared so swiftly, the saplings have been unable to replace them fast enough. Indeed, the saplings, too, have been eaten. The under-storeys have therefore simply died away, and the animal species associated with them have disappeared. The unique, layered habitats have changed into more open, arid and uniform scrub-type terrain. Habitats change all the time in nature. But what has happened in the Kruger over the last half century is not natural, and is certainly not desirable. And there is worse to come.

Control by starvation
Some years ago, SANParks did away with artificial waterholes in the Kruger, forcing the animals to live close to natural permanent water. This occurred before the scientists introduced their no-culling regime, but it fitted in neatly with their new plan to lower elephant numbers by starving the animals to death. The plan stipulates that no elephants will be culled. Indeed, they will be allowed to multiply – doubling every 10 to 15 years – in time stripping the riverine habitats of all vegetation.

In order to stay alive, the elephants will then be forced to walk ever-greater distances to and from the water in their search for food. In Botswana, elephants now walk a total distance of 50km a day to find enough food to stay alive. There is no reason to believe this will not happen in the Kruger; indeed, the scientists are banking on it!

The plan is expected to have three effects:
1. The age at which elephant heifers have their first calf will increase from 12 years to possibly 18 years.
2. The interval between calves will increase from four years to six years or possibly more.
3. Lactating mothers will gradually stop producing milk and their calves will not have the energy to keep up with them on the daily trek. The mother elephants will have to make this double journey every day to stay alive. And so their calves will be abandoned – to die from starvation or be attacked by predators.

The scientists who developed the strategy state that the most important factor determining the rate of elephant population growth is the number of calves that survive their first 12 months. They believe that by restricting plant nutrition levels in the Kruger – through a system that effectively starves the calves to death – they will be able to stabilise the park’s elephant population growth ‘naturally’.

Effect on the park
What will happen to the park during this process, particularly during the dry season? Firstly, all the big trees near the rivers will be ring-barked or pushed over. Then the under-storey plants will be eaten down to the ground or die of desiccation. The grass will be the last to go. (Remember that all the other herbivores are grazing and browsing too.) Finally, the soil will be pulverised by animals walking to and from the same overused river pools.

The end result will be a stressed system that cannot provide enough nutrition. Many animals will die. And all this will occur as a matter of course during an average dry season. Should there be a drought, many thousands of animals will perish. This is no wild-eyed, alarmist prediction; over the last 50 years I’ve seen it happen – several times!

And what happens when the rains return? Surely everything returns to normal? Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Because the riverine vegetation has been stripped away, thousands of tons of rich topsoil now lie exposed on or near the river banks. The rain then simply washes it away, along with few bits of remaining vegetation, leaving behind rocky, barren ground.

It is commonly believed that tree roots ‘hold the soil together’. But the main cause of erosion is the impact of raindrops on exposed soil, and erosion is greatest on steep slopes such as river banks. The habitats in the reserve with the greatest biological diversity are riverine forests and evergreen thickets along the rivers. These are also the most fragile habitats.
Yet elephant and other herbivores will be forced to concentrate here during the six-month-long dry season.

Once the soil has gone, these habitats can never be rehabilitated, and the animals that once thrived in them will become locally extinct. Find this hard to believe? Visit the Chobe National Park in Botswana, the Mahango Game Reserve in Namibia or the Lundi River area of the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe. You will see the results of elephant populations being allowed to proliferate without control.

A national park is not a zoo set aside for the uncontrolled proliferation of elephants. It is a sanctuary whose principal purpose is to maintain the area’s biological diversity. The Kruger, arguably our greatest natural treasure, is losing its rich fauna and flora rapidly because of a blind refusal to control elephant numbers by culling. I fear that, soon, it will start to look like the desert it is destined to become.

Email Ron Thomson at magron@ripplesoft.co.za or visit www.ronthomsonshuntingbooks.co.za

Ja, this is going on in Hwange in Zim as we speak!


Personally, I think the CITES conference going on is a stepping stone for SP to start culling again without losing face, and sending ivory to China, like the rest of the continent is doing! Also sustainable utilisation, the watchword for SP these days!

Which is fine, and suits everyone!

This seems apt here.

Elephant numbers not unmanageable – SANParks

Date: April 30, 2013

The South African National Parks (SANParks), have denied allegations that high elephant numbers in the Kruger National Park (KNP) have reached unmanageable levels.
Dr Salomon Joubert, director of the KNP from 1986 to 1994, said on Monday (29 April) that the elephant population in South Africa’s largest wilderness area was a “huge problem”.
“There is an over abundance of elephants in Kruger at the moment. The animals have knocked the daylights out of important ecosystems in certain parts of the park and it is going to be extremely difficult or impossible to reduce the population to manageable levels,” Joubert said.
Dr Sam Ferreira, Large Mammal Ecologist for SANParks countered Joubert’s statements by saying that the 2012 elephant census counted 16 700 individuals, well below what SANParks had projected.
“In 1994, when Kruger stopped elephant culling, there were about 8000 elephants in the park and the population was growing at 6.5% per annum. That predicted that Kruger should have had 24 500 elephants in 2012,” said Ferreira.
“Elephant population growth has decreased to 3.5%. The bottom line is that across Kruger, SANParks observe indications that the elephant population are stabilizing, but differently in different landscapes,” he added.
“The obvious questions is how this can be, given that it contrasts dramatically with perceptions that society at large may have,” Ferreira said.
Joubert was of the opinion that “thousands” of elephants needed to be culled in order to control the population.
“Not only would we have to bring the numbers down to Kruger’s carrying capacity, which I believe is 8 000 elephants, but we would need to take it down to below this to account for the population growth which will occur in the years following this,” he stated.
“SANParks seeks to manage the effects of elephants and not elephants per se,” Ferreira responded. “We have taken the lead and focus on managing direct mechanisms of ecological, conflict and stakeholder effects. Elephant culling is part of our management plans, as well as the closure of artificial waterholes and increasing the size of the park to allow easy movement by elephants.”
Ferreira added that birth rates were declining as the elephant population size was increasing.
“SANParks consider this as strong evidence for natural control of elephants,” he said.
Ferreira admitted that the elephant poaching crisis in Mozambique could spill over into the KNP.
In a 2011 aerial survey of Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve, an alarming 2 667 elephant carcasses were counted. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the illicit trade in ivory is estimated to have doubled since 2007 and more than tripled over the past 15 years. - The Write News Agency

Dr Sam Ferreira, Large Mammal Ecologist for SANParks countered Joubert’s statements by saying that the 2012 elephant census counted 16 700 individuals, well below what SANParks had projected.

They didn't "count" anything other than selected areas, (22%) and extrapolated statistically!...They couldn't even do a proper aerial rhino census!

http://www.sanparks.org/parks/kruger/co ... nimals.php

From SP's own website, the last figures from 2005 aerial census: In 2005, Kruger's elephant population was found to be 12,467. 1,769 were lone bulls and 10,698 were sighted within breeding herds.

http://www.sanparks.org/parks/kruger/el ... unting.php

So in 2005 it was 12 467, but in 2010 it was 11,672....

http://www.krugerpark.com/blog/index.ph ... discussed/



The need for population control can be seen in the growth of this species within the park, from just 65 in 1918 to 11,672 as of 2010. This population grows at a rate of 7% per year. The park faces a balancing act of conservation and land management, always at odds with the obvious need to protect and nurture the long-standing elephant families that live there, and the rapidly consumed land on which these elephants make their lives.


South African National Parks chief executive, Dr David Mabunda, put a final word on SANParks’ standpoint on culling as it stands now, saying the organization was not planning any mass culling of elephants in the near future, a “heartless, impossible and unaffordable” idea as he called it. SANParks will need to cull animals in the future, he added, to control their numbers and preserve the park for future generations. When this decision comes it will “be informed by scientific research, management imperatives and prevalent trends as an option of last resort.”

Then 13 050 in 2007...more reliable:

http://www.krugerpark.co.za/krugerpark- ... 24658.html

So according to Dr Ferreira the figure has only risen by 3000 in 5-6 years?

I don't know which forumites are statisticians, but that would bring 17500-odd at 5% now, the very lowest estimate possible, including hoped-for natural movements to neighbouring areas and ignoring Dr Whyte's provisos mitigating slow increase back then, which would be largely different now?

At 7%, the norm provided by SP itself, the absolute lowest would be 19500 now.

If one takes 2005, admitted to, as a base point, at 5% today would be 18500.

At 7%. it comes to around 24 500...

25000 is the figure recognised by most I spoke to last year already.

New life for massive giants of Kruger

November 10 2013 at 09:00am
By Sheree Bega

ohannesburg - Seven years ago, the elephants of the Kruger National Park were very angry with Dr Sam Ferreira. They defecated in the driveway of his home in Skukuza and shoved his car around like a toy at least four times.

Ferreira, a large mammal ecologist, had joined the Kruger’s team of conservationists in the midst of one the most fractious periods for elephant conservation: SANParks was locked in a hugely emotive debate over its plans to restart culling after a 13-year ban.

“That was also at the time they were starting the abattoir and the elephants were very angry with me,” remembers Ferreira, smiling. “But I haven’t had an elephant do that to me in years and it’s because the Kruger’s elephants are now in the space they need to be.”

And, after all the years he has spent shielding elephants, the khaki-garbed scientist, who sports a gold earring, still takes his guidance from the enigmatic, powerful creatures.

Don’t talk about culling. That’s because there’s a lot more to managing the elephants in the Kruger than putting a bullet in their heads, he believes. But between 1966 and 1994 that’s exactly what authorities did – killing over 16 000 elephants to limit numbers.

Ferreira is pleased that there has been a shift from the agricultural mindset of culling which has been “absolutely embedded in the SA psyche”.

Conservationists are far more interested in encouraging diversity, he says, and he is proud to be part of a team that is “thinking outside the box” about elephant conservation.

“If you want to manage the effects of elephants, what you’re really interested in is managing the landscape and restoring the natural variation in landscapes.”

Just how many elephants are there in Kruger today? It’s a question Ferreira is asked all the time. A formal survey last year identified around 16 000 elephants roaming the park. A better question for Ferreira is how do elephant densities vary across the park?

In 2005, SANParks recommended wiping out thousands of elephants in what would have been the largest slaughter in the world, citing how elephant populations in parks like the Kruger were negatively affecting biodiversity. But it unleashed fury among some conservationists and animal-rights activists who called for tourism boycotts.

By 2008, former environmental affairs minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, after declaring it a “devilishly complex” problem, ruled that culling would only be allowed once all the other available options including contraception, translocation and wildlife corridors, had been ruled out. Since then, explains Ferreira, only “problem” elephants have been shot.

In the Kruger, it is about encouraging high and low elephant densities to develop in different areas of the park. “There is no such thing as an ideal number,” he believes.

“If you have a forest and a grassland making up the Kruger, do you expect we’ll have the same number of elephants per km2? No. Kruger happens to have 35 different landscapes.”

Earlier this year, conservationist Salomon Joubert, who headed up the Kruger between the 1980s and 1994, demanded culling urgently resume as elephants were “knocking the daylights” out of important ecosystems in parts of the park.

But even as concern grows that elephant numbers are reaching a crisis point, an amazing thing is happening. In parts of the Kruger, the numbers are stabilising, and even levelling off.

Ferreira explains that, although elephant population size is increasing, it is doing so at a slower rate due to declining birth rates. A big part of this is because SANParks has closed more than two-thirds of its boreholes in the Kruger since 1997, and is now mimicking more natural water distribution.

“Two things are happening,” says Ferreira. “The elephant growth rate is dropping. It’s now two percent and it was 6 percent when we stopped culling… By the time we stopped, cows were having calves an average of every three to four years. At the moment we’ve worked it up to every 4.2 years. The year-on-year variation in elephant numbers is larger. There’s a bigger bouncing up and down of numbers.

“Generally what we’re seeing is that elephants are using landscapes differently than they did before. They are actually going to some places often, some places sometimes and others very little, and that’s the variation we want to see.”

SANParks says management actions like culling that forcefully keep animal numbers constant are unnatural. It’s a far cry from the decades where it fixed numbers at between 6 000 and 8 000 elephants.

Professor Norman Owen-Smith, of Wits University, who served on the Elephant Science Round Table, a collection of the world’s top elephant scientists to lead the elephant assessment process, projects that the Kruger could potentially support over 30 000 elephants.

This is based on comparisons with Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and Luangwa in Zambia, which are currently carrying densities around or exceeding two elephants per km2, he explains.

“For the growth of the elephant population to eventually cease, elephants must experience the effects of food shortages on their rates of reproduction and survival of calves.

“By restricting water supplies, food shortages become acute during the dry season when elephants must drink regularly, but are alleviated once the rains come and elephants can move more widely.

“It is evident that this mechanism is slowing or perhaps even halting the growth of the elephant populations in Hwange and Luangwa.”

Ferreira agrees. “If an elephant gets to a tree too regularly, what happens? The tree dies. What causes an elephant to get to the same tree very often? Where its key resources are. Food, water, shelter or being away from people.

“If you have now gone and put additional water in a landscape, they can stay in the dry season in areas they would not normally have been and those trees have elephants all the time and that is elephant impact. If you want to manage elephant impact, you manage the landscape, and allow droughts to happen.

“You allow natural variability to start. We need to work around the things that were done wrong in the past. We’re already seeing how elephants respond differently in different regions of the Kruger. In some regions there are some signs of it stabilising.

“In the south there has been a reduction in the birth rate. Cows have to walk long distances between water and good food and are finding it harder to reproduce. In the north, we’ve really increased the distance to water, affecting the survival of calves who are just weaned. They are having a much harder time. Some people are saying the Kruger is starving thousands of young elephants. We’re not. You would see bodies lying all over.”

Thousands of elephants in the Kruger mean a substantial opening of the tree canopy cover, says Owen-Smith. “This is clearly evident in fenced enclosures established within the park. However, we are unsure how the vegetation changes will vary over different regions of the park, and what the consequences will be for other species.

“There is much that we still need to learn about the factors governing elephant movements and what causes them to concentrate in particular places at different times of the year.

“But it is also crucially important to study how tree species cope with the impacts of elephants and where these trees might persist in places where elephants concentrate less densely during the dry season when most tree damage occurs.”

Culling, says Owen-Smith, is crude and impractical, while contraception does not alleviate the impacts that the elephants will continue to have on vegetation. “Wildlife corridors can be helpful in alleviating local densities, provided the area available is large enough, but allowance needs to be made for resolving conflicts with humans living near the corridors. There is no longer space left for elephants to be translocated.”

Jason Bell, the elephants’ regional director at the International Fund for Welfare, lauds SANParks’s rethink.

“The key issue is that they’re no longer focused on managing elephants, they’re looking at managing the landscape and so it’s more about how elephants interact with their environment, understanding that and managing that. Elephants are having an impact. What is driving that impact? They’re trying to manipulate the way elephants use space.”

Ferreira says while elephants do push down trees, this also creates habitat for other species.

“Yes, they could pull down one tree, but leave a whole bunch standing. It also creates opportunities for diversity.”

He has spent the past few months running through 48 risk assessments for elephants, including planting chilli peppers, detonating firecrackers and chasing elephants with helicopters from areas where there is concern over possible impacts.

“It’s an experiment that’s about to get under way. You have to learn by doing.”

But he is certain about one thing. “There’s no way you can practise conservation for conservation’s sake. You have to improve people’s livelihoods by sensible natural resource use. You have to put people first and do it in a way that the conservation benefits are accidental.” - Saturday Star

Thank you Toko, that was a very interesting and illuminating article, especially for someone who loves elephants

Thanks, Toko!



“There’s no way you can practise conservation for conservation’s sake. You have to improve people’s livelihoods by sensible natural resource use. You have to put people first and do it in a way that the conservation benefits are accidental.”

Most of this article is highly speculative and feeble, IMO.

There was no proper census done on elephant, and if last year's was so "conclusive", were previous estimates then "inconclusive"?

Is it more humane to let calves starve to death?

What part of the slow mass-starvation of elephant in Hwange did they miss during the drought there?

Is it acceptable that elephant slowly destroy riverine areas as they gather around there at the moment?

Can Kruger's population of elephants be allowed to run their "natural course" while in an entirely unnaturally fenced off area?

Would local communities prefer sustainable utilisation in the form of a lengthy experiment, or to be provided with cheap or free elephant meat?



No...it's a cop-out, and the only reason there is not absolute chaos yet is because of the extended wet cycle Kruger has been experiencing over the last decade or two., IMO.