“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” – John Muir
Have you ever felt the quiet relief of standing beneath a vast open sky, the rustle of leaves only the mind can hear? Or the way your breath seems to soften if you’re lucky enough to watch a herd of elephants move gracefully across the plains, their massive forms swaying with serene certainty?
Nature, in all its rhythms and silences, has an extraordinary ability to soothe a restless mind, a truth that becomes even more relevant as we observe International Stress Awareness Day, 2025, on Wednesday, November 5th, during International Stress Awareness Week (November 3-7). This year’s theme, “Optimizing Employee Wellbeing through Strategic Stress Management,” reminds us that sometimes, the most strategic step we can take for our well-being is to pause and reconnect with the living world around us.
It’s late evening in Ruam Thai village, just outside Kuiburi National Park in Prachuap Khiri Khan province, Thailand. On my laptop screen, camera trap videos flicker to life: an elephant (Elephas maximus) moving slowly across farmland, a farmer checking fields with a flashlight, the quiet tension of life lived at the forest’s edge.
Camera traps capture nighttime elephant movements through farmlands bordering Kuiburi National Park
This is what I have seen when assisting PhD researcher Sateesh Venkatesh to analyse camera trap footage from farms surrounding Ruam Thai. The village, established by the government, sits like an island, surrounded on three sides by national park. Families live clustered in the centre, while their fields spread outward, bordering the unfenced national park, it’s a layout that leaves farms vulnerable – and elephants know it.
It’s a quiet morning at the southern boundary of Udawalawe National Park, Sri Lanka. The light is soft, dew clings to the fence posts, and tourists gather expectantly beside the electric line. In their hands, some corn and smartphones. On the other side, shadows shift into focus, a male, unmistakably massive and composed, stretches his trunk toward the fence in an imploring motion. The corn lands at his feet. He clenches it with his trunk. Cameras click. Children giggle. A perfect moment.
To the casual observer, it feels intimate and even harmless.
But behind this feel-good interaction lies a troubling truth. These elephants aren’t here for casual curiosity; they’ve learned that this fence means food!
Across the range of the endangered Asian elephant, an insidious conservation crisis is unfolding. New research published in Ecological Solutions and Evidence by Dr. de Silva and colleagues reveals the hidden dangers of this seemingly innocent practice. Tourists eager for memorable encounters feed elephants at roadside fences, safari parks, and forest edges. These seemingly well-intentioned actions are transforming how elephants behave, where they go, and how they survive.
The air is fresh, there is a light dew on the leaves, and the first shafts of the morning sun pierce the tree cover as our team heads out to the field. These calm mornings in the field typically start the same way, but they disguise the complexity and challenges faced at night by many of the farmers we are off to meet. Mornings for these farmers mean an interlude between nights spent defending their crops from elephants and days of hard work maximizing the production of the same crops.
This slider shows areas containing habitat for elephants (yellow) in the year 1700 vs. 2000.
Where Did The Elephant Habitats Go?
The bulk of conservation efforts center around protected areas as the primary means of safeguarding wildlife and wild places. This is in response to recognizing that human activities are altering the face of the earth at an alarming pace, leading to the loss and fragmentation of habitat for numerous species. Often, our attention is on proximate threats and especially on particular biomes, such as forests. But over what sort of timescale and what sorts of ecosystems have these changes actually been taking place? In order to protect the biodiversity we have today, we have to really understand the processes that maintain them and how we got to where we are.
Asian elephants provide a good perspective on the problem. I’d heard some conservation organizations state that elephants had lost as much as 90% of their historic range, but I couldn’t find a single scientific reference that showed this. Was it true? When I first saw their distribution on a map, I got curious – though classified as a single species, Asian elephant populations occupy many different types of landscapes ranging from grasslands to rainforests that are now cut-off from another. At one time, these disparate populations must have been joined together and if we could reconstruct what happened to these habitats over time, we would have part of the answer. So, I enlisted a team of collaborators to find out exactly when and where elephant habitats started disappearing. In a way, you can think of elephants as being ambassadors for these ecosystems (a reason they’re referred to as “flagship” species). But we couldn’t know exactly where elephants or their habitats had been simply by looking at maps or records directly, so we needed a different trick.
At the beginning of 2022, no one would have anticipated Sri Lanka’s year to be so dire (and that’s saying something after the anguish from the global pandemic we all shared in!). The country suffered from one of its most severe economic crises – there was no fuel, extended power cuts, no fertilizer, no food crops, no tourism, and the list goes on… With no political and economical stability, Sri Lanka was looking over the precipice of a terrible crisis. Given Sri Lanka’s demographics, the majority of the people in rural areas are farmers and they were severely affected by these difficult times.
Jasmine (center left with pink ears), in 2012 with her calf Josh.
From Shermin:
When I first started the project in 2005, I was touched to see the relationship between an inseparable pair of elephants. The elder, who I named Janet, was toothless and slender, clearly a grandmother who was peacefully nearing the end of her long life. The other, who looked almost exactly like a younger version of her, was in the peak of her life. I thought this must be her daughter, somewhere in her twenties perhaps. I named her Jasmine, after my favorite flower, because I thought her so pretty with her perfectly triangular and symmetric pink-edged ears. She was perfectly proportioned, a textbook example of elephant-ness. They went everywhere together, drifting in and out of a larger social group that I thought might be a single family.
Elephant behavior has long endeared the public. From complex social structures to tool use, hearing stories about behavior not only teaches about fantastic ecological adaptations, it shows a window into elephant’s lives that we can understand and relate to on a personal level. Showcasing behaviors has often been used to help elephant conservation. However, behaviors are sometimes disconnected from how managers actually conserve elephant populations. In a new study, we examine elephant space use behavior in the hope that it can directly inform management practices.
UWERP’s field technician, Janaka, delivering a month’s supply of dry rations to a rural Sri Lankan family
The story so far…
Over the last few months, Sri Lanka’s economy crashed and the island nation is now facing its worst economic crisis in history. For Sri Lankans, the crisis has turned their daily lives into an endless cycle of waiting in lines for basic goods – many of which are being rationed. Why is this happening?
The main reasons are loss of foreign currency due to COVID’s impact on tourism, and mismanagement of the country’s predominantly agricultural economy. Foreign reserves have been reduced by roughly 85%, grinding daily life to a halt. There are huge lines for fuel (for transport) and gas (for cooking). The lack of fuel also affects the country’s power supply, with people facing up to 16 hrs of power cuts daily. The lack of fuel has created a shortage of vegetables in the market and thus the prices have shot up by 30-80%. Additionally, as the country cannot afford imports, products like butter and milk powder are now unavailable. The Sri Lankan Medical Association has also stated that medical supplies are running low and by the end of April, Sri Lanka ran out of key medicines and medical supplies.
Visual monitoring of wild animals has been modernized over the years through technologies such as high definition photography and camera trapping[1]. Researchers can now document populations, movement, and behavior of certain species using large volumes of data over longer periods[1,2]. These tools aid population research, but photo-identification still relies on our ability as humans to distinguish certain features of individuals[3]. Because identification remains a manual task, extracting information from visual data can be expensive and time-consuming[4]. (Read our previous blog on UWERP’s EARS – Elephant Attribute Recording System – IDs Database here).
MSc student, Elgiriyage de Silva, at the University of Colombo, is lead author on their recently published CNN study, alongside others including Dr. Shermin de Silva and Udawalawe Elephant Research Project’s (UWERP) Research Supervisor, T.V. Kumara. The study made use of CNN in order to determine the feasibility of such technology to identify Asian elephants, and used 10 years of labeled photographs of wild Asian elephants collected by the UWERP study. The researchers considered full body, face, and ears as three points for individual identification. Two techniques namely Training from Scratch (TS) and Transfer Learning (TL), which made use of a pre-trained model, were applied to five CNN models: Xception, Inception V3, VGG16, ResNet50, AlexNet. These models were evaluated for their efficiency in correctly identifying an individual as the top candidate or including the correct individual among the top five possible candidates[3].
Caption: Photos of male 006 showing all three types of images used in the study – body, face and ears. Clearly photos of even the same individual can look very different based on angle, lighting and movement!Continue reading →
