In Botswana, for example, it has been argued that there are so many elephants that the ecosystem cannot naturally support them. But, on a continent-wide scale, the giant mammals are in decline. Despite peaking in , poaching for ivory remained a "significant driver" of the decline, he told BBC News.
Where animals share that land, Dr Okita explained, it is important to use it in a way that is compatible for them. Isla Duporge from Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford, said: "While on the surface this looks bleak, the fact it's being flagged is actually positive.
Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, said: "I hope that it will lead to greater conservation actions for both species. Ms Duporge said conservationists doing work "on the ground in Africa" to protect habitats would be the most crucial players in the effort to protect the animals. Weighing more than 12, pounds means they make deep footprints as they walk across the land, which are so significant in size that they become microhabitats themselves.
As they fill with water they become alive with at least 61 different macroinvertebrate species from nine different orders making their homes in and around the footprints, as discussed in the recently published paper in the African Journal of Ecology. This is significantly less than the 1.
Yet the combination of poverty and guns in Africa means while ivory is being bought and sold anywhere, these animals, whose footprints contain an ecosystem of their own, will not be sufficiently protected. In July , the U.
This is not good enough and undermines international conservation efforts. We must put pressure for a ban on ivory globally — everywhere — if we want to see the elephants survive, for their own right as well as the wide range of animals and environments that will suffer from their disappearance Advertisement. International governments must close domestic loopholes exploited by criminals trading ivory and other products made from killing elephants.
There also must be increased funding for on the ground wildlife enforcement in Africa to stop the poaching on the killing fields. It is ludicrous that the ban on ivory and their protection is still even needing to be discussed in government forums in If ivory trading is not stopped they will all be dead in twenty years — the question is not should we do anything, it is what more can we do and how quick can we do it?
Lastly, being publicly-funded gives us a greater chance to continue providing you with high-quality content. Please consider supporting us by donating! You must be logged in to post a comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.
Karl Mathiesen explains why there has never been a more dangerous time to be an elephant. The largest of all land beasts, elephants are thundering, trumpeting six-tonne monuments to the wonder of evolution. From the tip of that distinctive trunk with its , dextrous muscles; to their outsize ears that flap the heat away; to the complex matriarchal societies and the mourning of their dead ; to the points of their ivory tusks, designed to defend, but ultimately the cause of their ruin.
African and Asian elephants are more closely related to the woolly mammoth than to each other. The ears are said to be a geographical guide. In Asia, elephants have smaller India-shaped ears. While in Africa their huge ears are the shape of the whole continent. Asian elephants used to roam from the coast of Persia through India and southeast Asia and deep into China. In Africa, they could be found in almost every habitat from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope.
Most common in the savannahs, elephants still inhabit a wide variety of landscapes. They can be found in the Saharan and Namibian deserts and the rainforests of Rwanda and Borneo. But their range has shrunk and they are now extinct in the Middle East, on the Indonesian island of Java, northern Africa and most of China. Almost everywhere, these great nomads are restricted to ever-decreasing pockets of land. But today, after years of poaching and habitat destruction, those numbers are a tiny fraction of what they once were.
In Asia, it is estimated that less than 50, elephants remain; more than half of them in India. Tiny populations, a few hundreds or thousands, cling on in countries across south-east Asia and the Himalayas.
In Africa, the larger of the two species is a step further from extinction. Less than half a million roam the continent , mostly in the southern states. In the west and the forested centre, elephants are in a particularly perilous condition. For thousands of years ivory has been prized and elephants have been killed for it. The Egyptian pharoah Tutankhamun was laid to rest around BC on a headrest of ivory, while in nearby Syria elephants were more or less wiped out for their ivory by BC.
The invention of guns increased the pressure. The 19th century brought a fashion for big game hunting among colonialists, which wiped out herds across the continent of Africa. Now the remaining dwindling numbers face the threat of local hunters and modern poaching gangs, financed by Asian syndicates and armed by the conflicts of Africa.
Some experts see the brutal killings of elephants not as a battle for a commodity, but for land. As the human population booms, so does demand for space. Poaching conveniently removes elephants from the land, leaving it open to development.
0コメント