Written by Natalie Liquindoli (University of Vermont)
Snap, crackle, pop! No, that’s not the sound of your tent mate eating a bowl of rice crispies at one in the morning, but it is the sound of an elephant (Loxodonta africana) snapping branches ten meters away from your tent. Botswana currently has the largest elephant population in the world, consisting of 120,000 to 150,000 elephants. What makes elephants so unique is their level of intelligence and unique social patterns. It is said that elephants can communicate miles away from each other, using a tone that is undetectable to the human ear.
We have had a very strong wet season so far this semester, meaning there is a lot more water availability across the country; because of this, females will not travel as far and won’t come close to the humans and roads in order to protect themselves and their young. This has also been the main reason that we have been observing mostly male elephants and have not seen any females. The male elephants, also known as bulls, normally travel on their own or in loose groups once they hit the age of around twelve and become more mischievous.
Elephants are both browsers and grazers, meaning that they eat both grasses/plants and from the trees. Just the other day we were watching an elephant that was positioned about 20meters away from our car. We spent about half an hour watching him eat and noticed that he was eating wild cucumber (Acanthosicyos naudinianus). He would use his trunk—which consists of 100,000 muscles– to pull up the plant and before lifting it to his mouth, he would slap it against his stomach in order to chase away the pestering insects and flies. They then slowly lift their meal into their mouth and chew it ever so leisurely; sometimes half of what they put into their mouth ends up falling out a second later. Since elephants only digests about 44% of their food, they must eat 4-6% of their body weight in food per day; for example, a 5000kg male would need to eat 300kg of food each day, explaining why we constantly see the elephants eating. When looking at elephant dung you will notice the undigested grass and leaf’s left behind in it; there is even enough nutrition and organic matter in it that mushrooms will grow out of the dung. Birds are even able to eat the undigested plants from the elephant dung to receive a decent amount of nutritional value. Throughout their lives, elephant go through six pairs of molars in theitheir 60 to 80 years of life.
Although elephants provide a variety of benefits for the environment, such as creating trails and knocking down trees to allow sunlight to reach other plants to grow, they also create a substantial amount of destruction. Elephants are a type of animal to do whatever they want for leisure, even if it doesn’t have a purpose. While in Mababe, an elephant ruined a village member’s watermelon garden by ripping down the fence where they were growing and did not even eat the watermelons. The women then threw all of her hard work out onto the road so that it wouldn’t draw the elephants back to her house to cause even more destruction. We were also told by a large carnivore scientist, Dr. Peter Apps, of how he had footage of an elephant pulling out all of the stakes holding his camera traps from the ground, and just threw them around and started stomping on them. It’s as if the elephants know they were being watched on the cameras!
One way to tell where elephants have been around any country is by looking at their markings made on trees. Many elephants will rub their tusks up against the bark of trees, sometimes in order to sharpen their tusk or clean them. Elephant tusks can grow up to 61kg in a 60-year-old adult bull and is the reason why elephants are so highly poached for their ivory. At one point in time during the 30’s and 40’s it was estimated that populations were around 4 million and in 1979 was counted at 1.3 million due to poaching. Although the trade of ivory and hunting of elephants has been banned, one elephant is killed every 15 minutes. Today elephant populations are continuing to repopulate and hopes are that conservation will continue to keep this mammal under protection.