August 12 is World Elephant Day. To celebrate, Mongabay looks back at recent stories about how the future success of these mammals depends on healthy, connected habitats.
Asian elephants adjust what they eat
A recent study from Malaysia showed that Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are adapting to rapidly changing landscapes by diversifying their diets — a sign of resilience, but also a warning about the pressures reshaping their habitats.
In a heavily logged forested landscape, elephants ate a wide variety of available plants. These findings suggest that beyond formal reserve boundaries, when disturbances make it hard for the mammals to find their preferred plants, they can meet their nutritional requirements by including a broader selection of plants, the researchers say.
Meanwhile, elephants within a landscape dominated by oil palm plantations mostly ate the cultivated oil palm crops. This could expose them to conflict.
“Our findings highlight that elephants are highly adaptable feeders, but this flexibility often brings them into human-dominated landscapes, increasing the risk of conflict,” Mohammad Saiful Mansor, study lead author from the National University of Malaysia, told Mongabay’s David Brown.
A unique clearing in Central Africa draws elephants from the dense forests
Throughout most of Central Africa, it’s difficult to spot herds of forest elephants all at once. They move through dense rainforest, remaining elusive, their lives obscured by thick vegetation and distance. For tourists and even researchers, direct encounters are largely a matter of chance.
But Dzanga Bai is different, Mongabay’s David Akana reported. Often called the “village of elephants,” this mineral-rich clearing in Dzanga-Sangha National Park in southwestern Central African Republic draws dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of critically endangered forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) out of the dense forest. In the open, they feed and interact, returning again and again, highlighting the importance of such habitats.
African elephant genomes reveal human impacts
A continent-wide genomic study of both savanna and forest elephants in Africa found that as humans decimated elephant populations for their ivory and fragmented their habitats with farms and urban development, the effects of these disturbances appeared in the genomic patterns of both elephant species.
Researchers sequenced 232 genomes of the endangered savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephants across 17 African countries. Their analysis found signals of human impacts, reported Mongabay’s David Brown.
For example, they found that savanna elephants in Southern Africa are genetically diverse because their populations are connected, enabling the exchange of genes. However, elephants in Eritrea and Ethiopia now live in small, isolated habitats hundreds of kilometers away from other elephant populations, due to past hunting. The study found that in both countries, elephants have a high degree of inbreeding and low genetic variation.
What are elephants really scared of?
For younger readers, Mongabay Kids reveals how elephants are scared not of mice, but of … bees!
Banner image of forest elephants in Gabon. Image © Lucy Keith-Diagne via iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0).
