The largest land mammal, the male savannah elephant, at 12,000 pounds is also one of the most social. Regardless of where elephants live, their social behaviors and social structures remain largely the same. Cynthia Moss is a biologist who has studied herds of elephants in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, and has unlocked the mysteries of how these enormous animals learn as youngsters, raise their young, survive as adults and communicate with family members.
An elephant calf is part of a huge extended family, headed by an older female elephant, the matriarch. Families are cohesive groups of females and their young. Adult males leave the herd at around 14 years of age, and either roam alone or join other "bachelor herds," rejoining females during the mating season. The mother is responsible for providing the 250-pound newborn with milk, but when it comes to caretaking and protection, it's the job of the whole herd.
Mothers receive help from aunts, sisters and cousins, who serve as nannies. Known as "allomothers," these baby-sitters are young female elephants learning how to care for babies. Teaching female elephants how to rear their young is an important task. The survival of the young depends on how well they do their job. Elephants bear young only once every few years, so each baby is important to the survival of the herd.
As a young elephant grows, it learns how to become independent by watching and mimicking others. (sound familiar?) A calf will begin to experiment with it's trunk at about 4 months of age. Elephants can pick up something as small as a marble or as large as a tree with its trunk. It's the 40,000 muscles in the trunk that give an elephant's long snout so much dexterity.
As magnificent as the elephant is, it's hard to imagine humans wanting to kill them for their ivory trunks. Actually, it's not hard to imagine at all. The huge profits from ivory tusks led to a reduction in Africa's elephant population. Between 1979 and 1989, the worldwide population of elephants declined to dangerously low levels. In 1977, 1.3 million elephants lived in Africa. By 1997, only 600,000 remained.
The number of elephants has stabilized due to the 1990 CITES and a ban on international ivory sales. (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).
Even though it is illegal to kill an elephant in Africa, people continue to slaughter them. If they're not killed for their tusks, many African farmers complain that elephants are destroying their fields. Scientists are working on remedies to satisfy environmentalists and farmers. One solution has been a pepper-spray bomb that wards off elephants, and from which they soon recover, but due to their good memory, stay clear of that farm area in the future. In 1996 Michael Fay, an elephant researcher discovered a massacre of 300 elephants in northern congo, all with their tusks hacked off. As urban sprawl continues to block migration routes in and out of the protected areas, elephants rely on the open corridors provided by tradional Masai land use. Many feel the best way to alleviate human wildlife confilicts is to continue the huge eco-tourism in the parks of Kenya. That way the elephants become an important part of the local economy. I hope this can be done.
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