Poaching of African elephants indirectly decreases population growth through lowered orphan survival

Parker, Jenna M.; Webb, Colleen T.; Daballen, David; Goldenberg, Shifra Z.; Lepirei, Jerenimo; Letitiya, David; Lolchuragi, David; Leadismo, Chris; Douglas‐Hamilton, Iain; Wittemyer, George

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.091

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 48 publications

(81 reference statements)

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“…In their study of bull elephants translocated into the Tsavo ecosystem, Tiller et al (in preparation) 1 suggested that younger bulls may be more successful in adjusting to release sites because younger bulls naturally undergo periods of exploration as they disperse from their families and learn their place within bull society. Studies of wild orphaned elephants suggest variability among individuals in their ability to integrate with new groups, with some females demonstrating dispersal behavior more typically associated with males (Goldenberg et al, 2016;Goldenberg and Wittemyer, 2017;Parker et al, 2021). The sample size represented in the present study is small; it will be worthwhile to revisit whether males are more exploratory post-release than females in future work and how released male calf behavior compares with that of young, dispersing wild bulls, of which only one was collared in this study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Goldenberg¹,

Hahn²,

Stacy‐Dawes³

et al. 2021

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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The ability to locate essential resources is a critical step for wildlife translocated into novel environments. Understanding this process of exploration is highly desirable for management that seeks to resettle wildlife, particularly as translocation projects tend to be expensive and have a high potential for failure. African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) are very mobile and rely on large areas especially in arid environments, and are translocated for differing management and conservation objectives. Thus, research into how translocated elephants use the landscape when released may both guide elephant managers and be useful for translocations of other species that adjust their movement to social and ecological conditions. In this study, we investigated the movement of eight GPS tracked calves (translocated in three cohorts) following their soft release into a 107 km2 fenced wildlife sanctuary in northern Kenya and compared their movement with that of five tracked wild elephants in the sanctuary. We describe their exploration of the sanctuary, discovery of water points, and activity budgets during the first seven, 14, and 20 months after release. We explored how patterns are affected by time since release, ecological conditions, and social factors. We found that calves visited new areas of the sanctuary and water points during greener periods and earlier post-release. Social context was associated with exploration, with later release and association with wild elephants predictive of visits to new areas. Wild elephants tended to use a greater number of sites per 14-day period than the released calves. Activity budgets determined from hidden Markov models (including the states directed walk, encamped, and meandering) suggested that released calves differed from wild elephants. The first two cohorts of calves spent a significantly greater proportion of time in the directed walk state and a significantly lower proportion of time in the encamped state relative to the wild elephants. Our results represent a step forward in describing the movements of elephant orphan calves released to the wild following a period of profound social disruption when they lost their natal family and were rehabilitated with other orphan calves under human care. We discuss the implications of the elephant behavior we observed for improving release procedures and for defining success benchmarks for translocation projects.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Goldenberg¹,

Hahn²,

Stacy‐Dawes³

et al. 2021

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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“…Recent research demonstrated that elephants orphaned because of poaching have a reduced probability of survival [ 33 ], while surviving adult females were shown to exhibit higher levels of stress hormones and lower reproductive output [ 31 ], which can have serious implications for population persistence. In addition to the more traditional focus on abundance, conservation practitioners also need to consider the significance of maintaining population social structure and function, as this has crucial fitness benefits for the population and can help buffer against external stressors that increasingly accompany anthropogenic disturbance [ 63 , 64 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, poaching events in East Africa led to the formation of orphan groups of elephants that commonly consist of unrelated individuals, demonstrate weaker social relationships and rarely benefit from associating with older and more experienced individuals [ 30 , 31 , 32 ]. The mother–offspring bond is particularly important, as demonstrated by the reduced survival probability of orphaned elephant calves who lost their mothers early on in life [ 33 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Disruption Impairs Predatory Threat Assessment in African Elephants

Shannon

Cordes

Slotow

et al. 2022

Animals

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The transmission of reliable information between individuals is crucial for group-living animals. This is particularly the case for cognitively advanced mammals with overlapping generations that acquire detailed social and ecological knowledge over long lifetimes. Here, we directly compare the ecological knowledge of elephants from two populations, with radically different developmental histories, to test whether profound social disruption affects their ability to assess predatory threat. Matriarchs (≤50 years of age) and their family groups received playbacks of three lions versus a single lion roaring. The family groups in the natural Amboseli population (Kenya) reliably assessed the greater predatory threat presented by three lions roaring versus one. However, in the socially disrupted Pilanesberg population (South Africa), no fine-scale distinctions were made between the numbers of roaring lions. Our results suggest that the removal of older and more experienced individuals in highly social species, such as elephants, is likely to impact the acquisition of ecological knowledge by younger group members, particularly through the lack of opportunity for social learning and cultural transmission of knowledge. This is likely to be exacerbated by the trauma experienced by juvenile elephants that witnessed the culling of family members and were translocated to new reserves. With increasing levels of anthropogenic disturbance, it is important that conservation practitioners consider the crucial role that population structure and knowledge transfer plays in the functioning and resilience of highly social and long-lived species.

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“…Social relationships in early life are also important, as they represent crucial opportunities to develop social skills and may have long-lasting consequences in their own right. For instance, in social mammals, positive social environments early in life have been linked to stronger or more numerous affiliative social relationships in adulthood [3][4][5][6], better health [3,7] and increased longevity [8][9][10][11][12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The importance of mothers for the development of social behaviour and fitness is also well-established in many species [3][4][5]24,25]. For example, in elephants, chimpanzees, and yellow baboons, early maternal loss, even after weaning, is associated with altered social relationships in adulthood [3][4][5]24,26] and reduced lifespan [8,10,12,24]. However, many gaps remain in our understanding of behavioural development in natural populations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental, sex-specific and genetic determinants of infant social behaviour in a wild primate

Lange,

Griffin,

Fogel

et al. 2023

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Affiliative social bonds are linked to fitness components in many social mammals. However, despite their importance, little is known about how the tendency to form social bonds develops in young animals, or if the timing of development is heritable and thus can evolve. Using four decades of longitudinal observational data from a wild baboon population, we assessed the environmental determinants of an important social developmental milestone in baboons—the age at which a young animal first grooms a conspecific—and we assessed how the rates at which offspring groom their mothers develops during the juvenile period. We found that grooming development differs between the sexes: female infants groom at an earlier age and reach equal rates of grooming with their mother earlier than males. We also found that age at first grooming for both sexes is weakly heritable ( h 2 = 0.043, 95% CI: 0.002–0.110). These results show that sex differences in grooming emerge at a young age; that strong, equitable social relationships between mothers and daughters begin very early in life; and that age at first grooming is heritable and therefore can be shaped by natural selection.

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Poaching of African elephants indirectly decreases population growth through lowered orphan survival

Cited by 15 publications

References 48 publications

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

Social Disruption Impairs Predatory Threat Assessment in African Elephants

Environmental, sex-specific and genetic determinants of infant social behaviour in a wild primate

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