Science

When Habitats Collide: Farming and Elephants at the Edge of Kuiburi National Park

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By Lauren Sutton

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.

From Pineapples to Elephants

Kuriburi was declared a national park in 1999, protecting around 169 km2 of forest and wildlife (Charuppat, T., 1998). Before that, much of the land had been cleared for pineapple plantations. Pineapple is one of Thailand’s major exports: it grows year-round and provides high returns for farmers. But it also proved irresistible to elephants. Sweet and abundant, pineapples drew elephants out of the forest and into people’s fields, setting the stage for human-elephant conflict that continues today (Srikrachang, M. and Srikosamatara, S., 2005)

Alternative crops (citronella and lemongrass) trialled in Ruam Thai farmland, beside Kuiburi National Park.

Exploring Alternatives

As part of the alternative crops project, Trunks & Leaves and Bring The Elephant Home partnered in 2021 to research crops unpalatable to elephants. PhD student Sateesh Venkatesh, under the guidance of Trunks & Leaves founder Dr. Shermin de Silva, researches elephant behavior using technologies such as drones to map farming areas, trail cameras to detect elephant presence and behavior, and audio recorders to monitor conflict as elephants enter agricultural lands at field sites in both Thailand’s Ruam Thai and around Udawalawe National Park in Sri Lanka.

The wonderful Bring the Elephant Home team in Ruam Thai with Lauren (holding BTEH sign) as she volunteered, analysing trail camera footage.

Owen and colleagues (2024) report that lemongrass and citronella are among the most promising alternative crops: elephants generally avoid them, and they offer multiple market opportunities – selling fresh at local markets, dried for higher prices (or processed in teas), or distilled into essential oils for premium pricing and products such as artisan soaps.

Yet challenges remain. Producing oil requires large volumes of raw material and costly equipment. To sell products internationally, farmers also need FDA (Food and Drug Administration – a U.S. regulatory agency) approval and stable buyers. Without reliable markets for these alternative crops, many farmers may feel pressure to return to pineapples, with their familiar low market prices and challenges such as hormone chemicals and pesticides that are hazardous to farmers’ health, even though pineapples increase the risk of crop raids as both the fruit and sweet leaf bases are highly attractive to elephants.

An Emerging Challenge: Gaur

While elephants remain the most visible and impactful species raiding crops, they are no longer the only concern alongside Kuiburi National Park. Farmers report that gaur – Bos gaurus, large wild cattle that also roam the park, listed as vulnerable on the IUCN red list – are becoming just as problematic, and in some cases more dangerous. Like elephants, gaur are drawn to easy calories in fields, trampling and consuming crops. But they can also be unpredictable and aggressive, posing direct safety risks to people who encounter them at night.

This widening conflict highlights a bigger truth: when farms border protected forest, it is not just one species but entire communities of wildlife that interact with people. 

World Habitat Day: Lessons from the Forest Edge

This year’s World Habitat Day gives us the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of habitat. Too often, habitat is imagined as something separate – national parks and reserves over here, villages and farmland over there. But Ruam Thai shows that habitats overlap. The forest is home to elephants and gaur, but it is also the backdrop to farmers’ livelihoods. When the line between the two blurs, both sides feel the pressure.

Protecting wildlife habitat is not only about preserving forest inside park boundaries. It also means supporting the people who live alongside those boundaries – ensuring that their farms are viable, their families safe, and their economic futures secure. Without this balance, conservation becomes conflict, and coexistence slips further away.

A group of four elephants in a grassy wild vegetation within the national park, near Ruam Thai village, with lush greenery in the background.
A group of four elephants in a grassy wild vegetation within the national park, near Ruam Thai village, with lush greenery in the background.

Building paths to coexistence: What can help?

Science and monitoring: Camera traps and farmer observations provide crucial data where and when wildlife moves, helping to design better strategies.

Community leadership: Farmers must be central to decisions about land use, crop choices, and protection measures – as it is their livelihood that is impacted.

Support through donations and funding: Organisations such as Trunks & Leaves and their partners like Bring The Elephant Home are working directly with local communities to reduce conflict and promote coexistence. Supporting these initiatives – whether through donations, advocacy, or spreading awareness – provides the resources needed to expand research, farmer support programmes, and conflict-mitigation efforts.

A Call to Action

As I scroll through more videos from trail cameras, I see the daily balancing act in Ruam Thai: elephants searching for food, farmers striving to protect their fields. On this World Habitat Day, their story is a reminder that habitats are shared, not separate. The health of Kuiburi’s forests cannot be measured only by the wildlife within; it must also include the wellbeing of people at its edge.

If elephants and people are to coexist, we must commit to solutions that protect both wild habitats and human livelihoods. That means supporting alternative crops, strengthening community resilience, and recognising that thriving habitats are those where both people and wildlife can live.

References

Charuppat, T. (1998). Using LANDSAT Imagery for Monitoring the Changes of Forest Area in Thailand. Royal Forest Department Bangkok. 121 pp.

Owen, A., van de Water, A., Sutthiboriban, N., Tantipisanuh, N., Sangthong, S., Rajbhandari, A. and Matteson, K. (2024). The Role of Alternative Crop Cultivation in Promoting Human-Elephant Coexistence: A Multidisciplinary Investigation in Thailand. Diversity, 16(9), pp.519–519. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/d16090519.

Srikrachang, M. and Srikosamatara, S. (2005). Elephant crop raiding problems and their solutions at Kui Buri National Park, southwestern Thailand. Natural History Bulletin of the Siam Society, 53(1), pp.87-109.

When Kindness Kills: New Research Reveals Why Feeding Wild Elephants is Never Harmless

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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. Shermin 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. 

Elephants are highly social and cognitively advanced animals, capable of social learning and cultural transmission (even of unhealthy habits) of behavior across generations. Once one elephant figures out that a certain location delivers easy – and delicious – calories from smiling humans, others quickly follow. These patterns persist across generations, becoming traditions; traditions that can get elephants killed. 

Tourist handfeeding a wild male Asian elephant alongside the double electric fence at the edge of Udawalawe National Park, Sri Lanka. (Note the slender metal fence post in the centre of the image, to the right of the larger original wooden fencepost. The second fence was an attempt to mitigate elephants breaking through the fence. A determined elephant can still break both.)

Tour operators, driven by the promise of easy elephant sightings and happy tourists, have little incentive to stop the practice. And despite formal bans on feeding in most countries, enforcement is rare. As a result, a growing subset of elephants is becoming “food-conditioned,” often more daring, and ultimately more vulnerable. 

This isn’t just an elephant problem. It mirrors issues with bears in North America, macaques in Sri Lanka, and marine mammals worldwide. Across species, food provisioning by tourists leads to aggression, habitat changes, disease spread, and often, death for wildlife and occasionally for people. 

For a species like the Asian elephant, with fewer than 45,000 left in the wild, every behavioural change we cause has the potential to ripple into their future survival, and these risks are catastrophic.

The Rambo Effect: How One Elephant’s Habit Spread 

In Udawalawe National Park, long-term elephant research has revealed the alarming impacts of tourist feeding. From 2007-2023, the Udawalawe Elephant Research Project (UWERP) identified 439 male elephants at the park’s electric fence-line (from a population estimate of 448-750 adult males). Of these, 66 individuals (9-15% of the estimated male population) were observed begging from tourists. Among them, one individual has become infamous: Rambo. 

Rambo makes his way to the buffet line…

Rambo began “begging” from tourists before there was even a fence. Over 17 years, the UWERP team have consistently observed him at the same stretch of road, collecting fruit from visitors. For a time, he seemed harmless, passive, even endearing. Remarkably, even during musth, which is a heightened reproductive state in male elephants typically roam widely searching for estrous females, Rambo sometimes remained localized near the roadside feeding site.  

The UWERP had long worried that tourists feeding Rambo sugary fruits like mangoes and bananas was having nagative consequence on his health, potentially leading to diabetes. Wild Asian elephants typically eat vastly more diverse, high-fibre, low-sugar vegetation. Rambo’s chrhonic eye discharge (noticed over ten years ago) may have been a sysmptom. 

Rambo’s ocular discharge visible as he begs for corn at his usual spot by the resevoir

By 2020, everything changed. When tourism collapsed during COVID-19, Rambo began breaking fences and raiding nearby sugarcane fields at night. He even breached a power station compound. Local conservationists worked tirelessly to prevent his capture during this challenging period. Injured twice by people and potentially exposed to dangerous materials like plastic-wrapped fruit, Rambo exemplifies how food provisioning escalates elephant behavior into increasingly risky territory. His story reveals the complex social dynamics of male elephants and how human interference can disrupt natural behaviors. Tragically, he hasn’t been seen since April 2023; at the time, he was approximately 53 years old. 

Wild male Asian elephants being fed along the park’s electric fence by local and foreign tourists.

After Rambo, other males followed suit. One died in a bus collision after fence-breaking. Another was shot. A third fell into a village well (although it’s unclear if he engaged in begging). And researchers have even found plastic bags in elephant dung near the fence. These are not isolated incidents; they’re predictable outcomes of long-term habituation. And the pattern is spreading. 

India Experiences 

In the Sigur region of India’s Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, a different experiment in food provisioning has unfolded over 15 years. Between 2007 and 2022, eleven male elephants were habituated by tourists and lodge operators who fed them sugarcane and fruits to lure them into view. 

Four of those elephants died from causes linked directly to human interaction, including wounds, poisoning, and one fatal attack by resort staff. 

The survivor with the most extraordinary story is Rivaldo, a tusker who lost a portion of his trunk to an explosive device. His trust in humans, cultivated through feeding, made it possible for veterinarians to treat him multiple times. But in 2021, citing safety concerns, officials captured Rivaldo and confined him to a kraal. 

Public outcry and legal action secured his release. A structured rehabilitation effort followed, with forest guards monitoring him and preventing further provisioning. As of 2024, Rivaldo is thriving, being healthier, independent, and rarely entering villages. 

When tourism halted during the COVID-19 lockdown, five of six surviving elephants also stopped approaching people. This natural pause showed that food-conditioned behavior is reversible, but only with strong intervention and community cooperation. 

In early 2024, workers at a local lodge attempted to restart elephant feeding. They were caught and arrested, a clear sign that vigilance and enforcement are still urgently needed. 

Feeding Fuels a Dangerous Cycle 

Feeding wildlife isn’t new, and elephants aren’t the only species. Around the world, species from bears to monkeys to dolphins have suffered from similar human behaviors. 

In Sri Lanka, toque macaques (Macaca sinica) have become emboldened and aggressive after years of tourist handouts. In Japan, macaques fed to reduce crop-raiding have overpopulated and caused worse conflict. In Yellowstone, food-habituated bears had to be killed. And in marine parks, dolphins and whales fed for entertainment have injured people and each other. 

Animals copy each other. And in long-lived species like elephants, these behaviors can become cultural, passed from mother to calf, peer to peer. Once a population starts associating humans with food, reversing that behavior becomes difficult and dangerous. 

Health risks add to the equation. Tuberculosis has been documented in elephants, and close contact through feeding increases disease transmission. Plastic ingestion, diabetes-like symptoms from sugary foods, and metabolic disorders have all been recorded in provisioned wildlife. 

Feeding is never just about food; it’s about changing entire ecosystems.

Breaking the Cycle: Solutions That Work 

Across Asia, researchers and NGOs are showing that crops like chili, lemongrass, and citronella deter elephants while improving farm incomes. In Thailand, farmer participation in BTEH’s program is growing. In Sri Lanka, similar experiments are underway. A 2024 study found that these crops not only reduce conflict but also outperform traditional ones economically. When communities own the solution, coexistence becomes a shared goal. 

It should also be considered that elephants need room to move. In Nepal, GPS collar data is helping map “elephant highways”, safe transboundary corridors between parks. This data-driven approach helps prevent tragic events like poisoned elephants found near towns. The future lies in maintaining landscape connectivity, not creating isolated “islands” of protected land. 

Apart from all that, science must lead policy. Dr. Shermin de Silva’s book Elephants: Behavior and Conservation emphasizes the need to integrate elephant culture and cognition into management decisions. Multi-country collaborations, Trunks & Leaves, BTEH, and Forest Action Nepal are already modeling this shift. 

Policy frameworks need to reflect behavior, not just boundaries. And tourism must be reimagined: not as a spectacle, but a tool for education and sustainable livelihoods. 

Feeding bans alone aren’t enough. We need systems that support better choices. 

What Can You Do to Help Today…

The solution isn’t complicated; it’s commitment. Here’s how you can make a difference. 

Learn & Pledge: Understand what ethical elephant tourism looks like and take the pledge for responsible wildlife experiences. 

Share the Knowledge: Read our comprehensive guide “Responsible Tourism & Ethical Elephant Experiences” and share it with fellow travelers. 

Speak Up: When you see irresponsible feeding, report it. Your voice can save lives. 

Support Solutions: Choose tour operators who prioritize elephant welfare over quick photo opportunities. 

The Asian elephant is running out of time. With fewer than 45,000 left in the wild, every action matters.  

Let’s ensure the next time a tourist points a camera at an elephant, it’s through a lens of respect, not regret.  

Access the full paper here:
de Silva, S., Davidar, P., & Puyravaud, J.-P. (2025) Don’t feed the elephant: A critical examination of food-provisioning wild elephants. Ecological Solutions and Evidence, 6 (3). doi.org/10.1002/2688-8319.70060

Shared History Ties Humans and Elephants: A Tale of Two Nations

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By Sateesh Venkatesh – PhD student, UCSD

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.  

Thailand sunrise
Thailand sunrise
Sri Lanka sunrise

My research covers two locations with remarkably similar problems, even though an ocean separates them. Outside of Thailand’s Kui Buri National Park, farmers spend their mornings preparing pineapple fields for harvest, while across the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka, farmers near Udawalawe National Park set out to monitor a variety of different crops. Though separated by thousands of miles, these communities share a common challenge: finding ways to thrive alongside Asian elephants in an increasingly crowded landscape. 

A wild Asian elephant waiting behind the Udawalawe National Park’s electric fence – for fruit from passing tourists.

As an elephant researcher working across these two distinct regions, I have a unique opportunity to compare how variations in historical contexts and cultural structures shape human-elephant interactions in real-time. While most scientific studies rely on comparing methods and results from published literature, our research teams simultaneously monitor these two sites to understand better how anthropogenic change, climatic variation, and regional stressors impact the complex and changing relationship between humans and elephants.  

Research Sites and Local Partnerships

Our research spans two carefully selected field sites, each offering distinct insights into how humans and elephants are currently co-existing. In Sri Lanka, we work at a site established by Dr. Shermin de Silva in 2006, situated just outside Udawalawe National Park, which covers 308km2. Our Thailand field site borders Kui Buri National Park – a protected area more than three times larger at 969km2 – where our partners at Bring The Elephant Home (BTEH) have built strong community relationships over two decades. In both locations, Asian elephants and humans share resources, particularly in agricultural areas, but the historical context of these interactions varies dramatically. 

Above: Sateesh with the Sri Lankan UWERP team by Udawalawe reservoir. Below: Sateesh with the Thai BTEH team outside their field station.

A Tale of Two Histories

In Sri Lanka’s Udawalawe area, people have farmed alongside elephants for generations. The construction of the Udawalawe reservoir in 1972 led to the establishment of the national park. The area that became the park had primarily been a teak plantation rather than farmland, which meant that establishing the protected area didn’t require relocating large areas of farming communities – as can often be the case. The farmers who live around the park’s edges today are largely from families who have traditionally farmed the surrounding lands for generations, maintaining their agricultural practices and long history of living in proximity to elephants. 

In contrast, Ruam Thai Village in Thailand represents a more recent human settlement. Established in the 1970s through a government initiative, the village brought together people from across Thailand to create a new community focused primarily on pineapple cultivation, two decades before the area would be designated as Kui Buri National Park in 1999. The crop’s high international market value made it economically attractive, and it also drew interest from local elephants. The tragic deaths of two elephants from poisoning and gunshot wounds in the late 1990s prompted His Majesty the King of Thailand to establish Kui Buri as a protected area specifically for elephant conservation. However, recent research by the  Udawalawe Elephant Research Project (UWERP) and Trunks & Leaves team has revealed that elephants in both locations typically spend only about 50% of their time within national park boundaries, highlighting the critical importance of understanding and supporting coexistence in the surrounding landscapes. (See Annie’s blog on How Elephants in Sri Lanka Use Protected Areas here.)

Ruam Thai village’s farming zones alongside Kui Buri National Park, Thailand.
Patchwork farming plots around Udawalawe National Park, interspersed with houses and forest fragments.

These different historical trajectories have shaped distinct landscape patterns. Sri Lankan farms form a patchwork of individual plots interspersed with houses and fragments of forest, reflecting generations of land division and management. Ruam Thai’s layout is more structured, with a centralized residential area separated from a consolidated farming zone that borders the protected area. 

Elephant Memory and Cultural Heritage

Over an elephant’s 60-year lifespan, they build up an extensive catalog of experience across a vast landscape. Due to the social complexity of elephant culture individual experiences become part of a vast assemblage of experiential knowledge that crosses generations. We’re discovering that elephant populations may develop distinct “cultures” influenced by their interactions with human communities over generations. In Sri Lanka, for instance, elephant family groups demonstrate sophisticated knowledge of traditional movement corridors that predate current human settlements. Meanwhile, in this area of Thailand, elephants show different patterns of adaptation to the more recently established agricultural landscape. 

The concept of generational learning adds another layer to this complex relationship. Like humans, elephants can pass on behavioral responses to past experiences. In both locations, we’re observing how historical interactions influence current elephant behavior and how these learned responses might be transmitted to younger generations. 

Pathways to Harmonious Coexistence

While the challenges in each location are unique, our ultimate goal remains constant: creating environments where both humans and elephants can thrive together. In Sri Lanka, this means building upon generations of traditional knowledge about elephant movement patterns. In Thailand, it involves developing new strategies that account for the more recent nature of human-elephant interactions. 

Current initiatives in both locations show promise. Sri Lankan farmers are experimenting with crops less appealing to elephants that will allow them to use the same land, while maintaining historic elephant pathways through their lands. In Thailand, community-led initiatives in high-conflict areas are exploring converting pineapple fields to organic alternative crops that will reduce conflict and improve healthy farming.  

Looking Ahead

As our research continues, we’re working to understand what successful coexistence looks like in these different contexts. Can the traditional knowledge of Sri Lankan communities inform new approaches in Thailand? Might Thailand’s community-centered development model offer insights for Sri Lankan villages? By studying these questions across two distinct cultural and historical settings, we hope to develop more nuanced and effective approaches to fostering positive human-elephant relationships. 

The path to harmonious coexistence requires patience and understanding, but studying the shared histories of humans and elephants in each landscape provides crucial insights for future conservation efforts. As we continue our research, one thing becomes clear: successful conservation strategies must honor both the human and elephant histories that shape each unique landscape. 

Where The Elephants Roamed

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By S. de Silva

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.

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How elephants in Sri Lanka use protected areas

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By Annie Madsen

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.

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New pan-Indian study of elephant genetics reveals surprises

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Herd of elephants in Terai Arc Landscape

Asian elephants were once widely distributed in India, but are now restricted to four widely separated regions: the north-western (NW), north-eastern (NE), east-central (ECI), and the southern India (SI). When you undertake the population genetics study of a wildlife species, the quality of the result is related to the design of the field sampling protocol. This is to ensure that the sampling is extensive covering different areas to avoid over-sampling of more accessible populations. When we started our population genetics study of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus L.), we planned to collect fresh elephant dung samples from across the beats and various ranges of protected forests in India. This of course often involved traversing through inhospitable and difficult terrain with a forest staff in attendance. The first problem were the elephants themselves. To get fresh dung, one had to go close to elephants for collecting samples. This often did not go down too well with some individuals who responded to the invasion by a determined charge. We were fortunate not to have suffered any mishaps and ultimately it worked out well and we were able to collate an impressive database of elephant dung samples.

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Camera Trapping Elephants in Agricultural Areas

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In partnership with Bring The Elephant Home in Thailand, we’re excited to share this picture diary from the field, by Brooke Friswold, who is a PhD student at King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi!

Written by Brooke Friswold

It has been another busy month in Ruam Thai Village! We have erected ten camera traps on pineapple farms with the consent of local farmers in areas with reported high frequency of visitation and five on lemongrass farmland rented by Bring the Elephant Home.

In speaking with the farmers they were very excited and enthusiastic to share their experience: some of the farmers say that the elephants are coming most nights to their land, while others say it can be weekly or also come in waves, with times of high visitation followed by lapses in appearance. The farmers were very eager and interested to share and discuss where the best placement would be for the camera traps, the trails the elephants use to enter, and the recent visitations they had.

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When farmers and elephants compete for space

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By Lena Coker

These farmers in Sri Lanka are at the interface of forest and agriculture, where most incursions by elephants occur.

In Sherpur, rural Bangladesh, as the human population increases, so does the demand for the land and natural resources that the elephants need to survive. This is a story of human-animal conflict that is repeated around the globe with many species and rural communities as they struggle to find the balance for coexistence. Continue reading →

E is for “Endangered”

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Or why we shouldn’t take those large odd-looking animals for granted.

E is for Endangered

Step into any nursery or play room, take a quick walk down the isles of your local bookstore or library. Or just look at the clothing and toys we surround children with. They are full of images of iconic animals – giraffes, rhinoceros, hippos, lions, elephants…

We use these animals to teach the alphabet, and cherish them as beloved characters in our story books. They adorn everything from birthday cards to blankets.

What would the world be like without them? Continue reading →

How early life may influence the way elephants age

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Guest post by Hannah Mumby, Myanmar Elephant Project / University of Sheffield

Elephant babies in myanmar

Elephant calves at a logging camp in Myanmar. Image courtesy of Hannah Mumby.

There are a great many reasons to study elephants; they’re endangered, highly social, quite frankly huge and hold a unique and central place in many cultures. They can also be very strong, sometimes dangerous and slow to do what you want. But that’s not enough to stop me from working on them! One of my interests is actually their life cycles. In the past I’ve studied humans and non-human primates and the fact that elephants evolved long lives, almost on a par with our own, but on a separate evolutionary trajectory was fascinating to me. Elephants also usually only have one calf at a time and each calf is dependent on its mother for many years. These characteristics allow us to test a lot of ideas underpinning theories of life history and ageing, including ones that have been primarily designed with humans in mind.

So why is this interesting? Continue reading →