Conservationists as Worried Parents
Imagine anxious parents away on a vacation, eager for updates at what is happening at home (constantly needing to ask: are the kids following rules or are they sneaking out at night? Is the babysitter crazy?) Conservationists are not much different from cossetting parents, varying only slightly in their worries: are any animals missing from the herd? Are they behaving abnormally? What is the human-animal interaction in the area? Updates are often necessary to make sure that the health and well-being of animals are maintained in the field, but this can be difficult when researchers are miles away from the field. Especially with wildlife, it is important to keep a distance to allow the most natural state for animals. However, there are methods that conservationists have adapted to observe wildlife non-intrusively, allowing intervention only when necessary; a few methods employed for elephants in particular include collaring, camera traps, and acoustic monitoring.
Collaring is a method in which an individual elephant is fitted with a collar containing a GPS (satellite) tracker. The method itself is rather expensive, costing $7,200 every year, until the batteries die about 3 years later and a replacement is needed¹. Due to costs and time frames, only a few elephants are collared within a population. However, with these few elephants, conservationists can collect and then use movement data to quantify the number of elephants, as well as to understand elephants’ social circles, migration patterns and interactions within their habitat. Furthermore, GPS collars are helpful in tracking poaching efforts. If the elephant is stationary for an extended period, often due to injury or poaching, an alert is sent from the collar to a nearby rescue team.
Last year, the largest elephant collaring effort took place at Tanzania’s Selous Game Preserve, a habitat where poaching decimated the elephant population today to 15,000 (a 90% decrease in under 40 years).² One of Selous’s elephants is shown below, but the collaring is often misunderstood by the public where collars look unnatural. Says Victoria Baldwin from African Geographic: “Nothing about clasping something around a neck that big feels right, but collaring is necessary these days.”² Whereas imbedded GPS chips can be used for other wildlife, they are not suitable for use in elephants because of their thick and the chance of infection.³ Though not perfect and involving a risky procedure of sedating the elephant to fit the collar and racing against the half an hour window allotted by morphine, collaring is still a popular and effective method to obtain movement data on elephants.
Another method that is gaining traction is the use of camera traps. A digital camera with an infrared sensor is attached to a tree.⁵ When an animal moves past the sensor, the camera fires, and the images are stored until developed by researchers. The results of these efforts are often fascinating, recording the rarest events that occur in nature. However, obtaining these results is not easy work! It often takes a full day to hike to remote locations for deployment and collection, cameras need to be moved occasionally because animals remember flashes, and hot climates such as forest locations can cause cameras to malfunction. If researchers don’t mind these challenges, events that normally go unobserved by humans become documented. Talk about some real candids!
The last method — a very exciting one — is used at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Elephant Listening Project (ELP) every day! Acoustic monitoring units have been set up in different sites across Central Africa, a range where forest elephants roam⁶. Sound recordings are collected to understand how African forest elephants communicate, where they are as well as to monitor threats such as gunshots that indicate poaching activity. ELP uses software analysis (a program called Raven) to visualize the sounds picked up by recordings. Elephant rumbles, gunshots, and other sounds are identifiable by the patterns they make in software images. However, great attention is necessary to distinguish between types of sounds. This is where our volunteers come in: human judgement, through listening to sounds directly or observing patterns on a spectrogram, helps determine if the call is truly from an elephant or another source; if not an elephant rumble, the sound may be an insect flapping its wings near the microphone, a bird taking off nearby, a distant vehicle, or a strike of thunder. Despite being intensive work (we have now collected 1 million hours of recording!), audio methods give invaluable data on the relative size of elephant populations (has the number of rumbles changed at various times?), communication and its significance, and specific threats used to decide the most effective anti-poaching patrols.
Through collaring, camera traps, and audio recording, conservationists are able to relax a little bit more knowing that if something goes wrong, we will be informed.
Works Cited
¹ “Elephant Collar Replacements in 2018.” Mara elephant project, 2017, https://maraelephantproject.org/elephant-collar-replacements-2018/
²Baldwin, Victoria. “Collaring elephants: behind the scenes.” Africa geographic, 2015, https://africageographic.com/blog/collaring-elephants-behind-the-scenes/
³“Collaring elephants in one of Africa’s last great wildernesses.” World wildlife fund, 2018, https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/collaring-elephants-in-one-of-africa-s-last-great-wildernesses
⁴“Elephant tranquilized for radio-collaring dies in coimbatore forests.” Conservation India, 2011, http://www.conservationindia.org/news/elephant-tranquilized-for-radio-collaring-dies-in-coimbatore-forests
⁵“Camera trapping for conversation.” World wildlife fund, https://www.wwf.org.uk/conservationtechnology/camera-trap.html
⁶“A brief history of ELP.” The Elephant Listening Project, 2015, http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/about/about.html
