A forest elephant family photographed in the Congo.
Forest elephants are the lesser-known cousins of the savannah elephant, and are restricted to the dense jungles of the Congo Basin in Central Africa. A recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that the construction of roads in Central Africa directly linked to a decline of forest elephants by giving access into remote areas by poachers. The Wildlife Conservation Society is working to safeguard elephant populations by bolstering enforcement in protected areas and parks and also calling for better patrolling along roads to reduce poaching.
Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience
Roads that now penetrate into the heart of Africa’s jungles are making it easier for ivory poachers to kill large numbers of forest elephants, a new study finds.
The elephants that do survive are being forced to turn tail and retreat to protected parks and spots not yet encroached upon by humans.
“Unmanaged roads are highways of death for forest elephants,” said lead author Stephen Blake, a biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York.
The study, detailed in the current issue of the journal PLoS Biology, reveals that along roadways elephant numbers plummeted, which the authors say is largely due to heavy ivory poaching in these areas. There is a large, international black-market trade in the ivory from elephants’ tusks.
“It is not the physical effect of the road that is the issue—forest elephants actually like roadside vegetation—rather it is the fact that unmanaged roads bring people, with their guns and ammunition,” Blake said.
…
This study is the first major scientific survey of the forest elephants since 1989, when scientists estimated a population of 172,000 forest elephants in the Congo Basin.
Between 1970 and 1989, half of Africa’s elephants (or about 700,000 individuals) were killed, mostly for their ivory tusks. The extreme decline spurred the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) to list African elephants and thus ban the international ivory trade. Currently, debate over repealing or modifying the ban has been the focus of CITES conferences. The ban was effective at protecting elephants at first, but it is largely unenforced now because governments have withdrawn funding for it.
The authors of the present study suggest that an informed debate and resolution on the matter relies fundamentally on a clear understanding of the size and trends in elephant populations along with the rates of illegal killing for ivory across Africa.
“We have shown that even with a near-universal ban of the trade in ivory in place, forest elephant range and numbers are in serious decline,” the authors state in the journal article.