Read it a few times to understand the core message because the thesis and title are slightly self-evident i.e. more isolation causes less socializing. But the crux seems to be:
> "We see individual elephants leaving and possibly dying at accelerating rates, but new individuals are not coming into the population,” said Madsen. “With fewer individuals in the population, those who are left will naturally have fewer relationships. However, the remaining elephants are also changing their relationships with each other."
In my opinion "dying at accelerating rates" is the/a key takeaway. Notably climate change doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned and hate to see poaching be a direct cause:
> Many elephant populations are already impacted through deaths resulting from poaching and conflicts with humans. Other contributing factors may be disruptions in habitat connectivity and less food available...
Other comments mention other intelligent and social species and this reminds me of Puget Sound Southern resident killer whales [0] and their decrease in food availability and offspring viability.
There's a few reasons driving all of these things, and yes, climate change is largely not a top issue as it moves far too slow as compared to other reasons.
First, is that places where elephants live are facing increasing pressure from the outside due to human settlement. National parks established decades ago or longer have borders which face ever-increasing human populations right on them. Human-wildlife conflict and elephants raiding crops farmed right next to parks are incredibly commonplace.
Second, that national parks established decades ago in most places were not designed for wildlife corridors to connect the parks. The concept of a way for elephants to walk 100km or 200km to another park is a relatively new notion. So, already, roads, cities, railroads, etc. prevent long-range migration, if for no other reason than the landscape and water sources needed for those migrations are also great spots for people to get water and establish a town.
Third, that poaching has forced elephants to change their own patterns to consolidate. They are increasingly isolated because they now feel they need to form super-herds of 50-100 individuals just to survive in places lacking proper wildlife law enforcement. So the elephants themselves see more danger in leaving the herd than staying put, which obviously creates a genetic diversity issue, among other problems.
These are all very recent issues, maybe the last 50 years in some ways, but changes in behavior like super herds are maybe the last 10-15 years in certain areas.
Dying at accelerated rates could have a number of factors, including poaching, obviously, but also stress from being in areas where poaching happens frequently drives behavior changes that might not lead to long life spans. There could also (just a guess) that after CITES was established in the 1970s to limit the ivory trade, there might have been a relative population boom. Elephants have long life expectancy, and so you have the competing incentives of older elephants with longer tusks being poached more, competing for food more, and older elephants are cantankerous. If they get into a village to eat crops, they might be shot to prevent human death, or (as I've seen happen) might each a whole field of something recently sprayed with pesticide, which can and does kill elephants.
I want to back up this comment as covering the key points in both stresses on elephant populations and human understanding and focal points for conservation.
One of my family members has been involved in this program since the 1990's. They try to anesthetize the matriarch and attach a gigantic collar while the elephan is knocked out. The anesthesia is fatal to the elephant without properly timed reversal agents. You can imagine what that means with a protective herd nearby.
The website mentioned above is obviously marketing copy from the zoo, but the program is impressive and has collected incredible data over the years. My favorite reality check to the marketing copy. One of the other articles from nczoo tells the narrative: "As we move through the forest, conscious of every foot fall, I notice the tracker suddenly throws up his hand, indicating to the team that we need to stop moving." Except the tracker actually drives -- and I'm not making this up -- a Harley Davidson.
Ultimately the sad truth is elephants need a lot of space and there is less and less available in the format they need as time goes on.
To put it more succinctly, the successful vaccination policies applied in Africa back in the 1980s started it all, there are now a lot more humans living in Africa which means a lot less wildlife habitat.
Not at all. In fact, that's a pretty ghoulish take, which also somehow ignores both elephants and population booms in Asia.
First off, let's recall that for generations elephants were hunted for ivory by the West to make piano keys and billiard balls, among other things. So their populations were artificially low prior to vaccination campaigns.
Pressures from poaching and the difficulty of getting tourism dollars to local communities so they value the elephants are a large parts of the problem that have nothing to do with populations one way or another.
The majority of trade routes and planning in Africa are driven by natural resource extraction, not by population alone. Roads and rail largely focus on trade, and very often populations shift to either where they can find land to farm, or jobs. Encroachment on parks isn't because the rest of the country is full, it's because it's near enough to where people already life, and demand for food from towns that support tourism economies leads to the logical step of growing food near those parks. Would you really fly or truck tomatoes across Kenya or Zambia when they can be grown 2km from where they'll end up?
Enforcement of wildlife policies, and wildlife corridors that have been established usually falls to woefully under-resourced wildlife law enforcement officers that have a tough time keeping up with the poachers on patrols of hundreds of square kilometers a day. By the time a few families move beyond an imaginary line on a map, they might have been farming for months or years.
> "Notably climate change doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned"
If it'd be my study, I'd also avoid mentioning climate-change explicitly.
With the (US-governments') move from mere verbal denial of climate change to institutional and policy-level skepticism of everything and everyone just using the term, it could cause the whole paper to be dismissed in discussions of some circles...
As if "some circles" were going to do anything about declining elephant populations to begin with. "Obeying in advance" isn't going to save you, your paper, or the elephants.
(With the assumption that climate change is one of the causes.)
Human elephant conflict is not something we have solved here in Sri Lanka yet and I think that too contributes to the accelerating rates of deaths (Humans die too, in this conflict).
PS: The article addresses this
> Many elephant populations are already impacted through deaths resulting from poaching and conflicts with humans. Other contributing factors may be disruptions in habitat connectivity and less food available for the elephants as ecological conditions change across the 119-square-mile park and surroundings.
It's curious that no one has mentioned meat, egg and dairy consumption as the main drivers for loss of habitat and biodiversity yet.
50% of habitable land is used for agriculture and we need all that land for feeding the our livestock, which is outnumbering mammal wildlife by far.
94% of non-human mammal biomass is livestock.
Wanna help the elephants? Eat no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish. It's easy as that.
My daughter is on a safari right now in Kenya. At one camp, an elephant came right up to the tents (she sent us a picture). This is apparently very common there. I wonder if the elephants are looking for social interaction, or maybe they know these tourist camps are safe from poachers.
That's really a useful finding that helps to connect the dots in the rapidly changing overall ecosystem of biosphere on Earth. I thought this pattern of diminishing social groups is specific to humans. But as usual, the phenomenon appears broader and more generic.
Education, jobs, desire for better living conditions did the damage for humans. Families became workers of the economies and were flung far apart.
For elephants, their distress is probably a direct result of their need for social grouping. A wild cat wouldn't have been affected by the lack of social groups.
Yes, EMF, environmental pollutants, more toxic metals going around (that used to be buried).
Not saying these are all likely, but especially the latter ones might play a small role.
E.g. polar bears and other predators have way higher retinol accumulations in their liver these days than 50 years ago, so apparently something is changing their metabolism.
Well there are more microbes around us than there are stars in the universe. They survive without smart phones, intelligence, religion, society and stories that need to fit in a 3 inch chimp brain about the meaning of it all. One of them recently killed 6 million people. Life goes on.
If I had to theorize, I'd put RF radiation (5G/4G/../WiFi) up there as the prime suspect. With water contaminated by hormones as a close second. Microplastics come in third place.
Because the hormones have been in the water supply since the mid 1960s, but cell phone towers are a more recent development. Plastic also dates back longer, we just didn't notice the microplastics earlier.
People putting a wifi router into their homes is even more recent than phone towers. Households I know only have wifi since the 2010s.
The electromagnetic field is only in the vicinity of the sender. For Bluetooth it's a radius of about 15cm (6in). Wifi is around 3m (9ft) and cellular is around 5m (16ft).
The signal travels much farther, of course, but the electromagnetic radiation past these is negligible.
People did not have radio senders in their home, they only had receivers. But your mobile phone, wifi routers and Bluetooth headsets also are senders. Yes, many hobbyists had a radio set at home, but the antenna was usually mounted on the roof.
Glad to see things like this are being funded. It’s easy to forget we aren’t the only smart, social creatures on the planet dealing with this rapidly changing world.
Hat tip to the elephants for not being sociopaths like the Orca. Or otters.
Maybe the elephants and octopus should form a brilliant animals but not sociopaths club.
Might want to look up what teen/young adult African elephants are like, particularly absent a strong father and during musth. [1] Pretty much all noble savage myths, human or animal alike, end up indeed being myths. Life's hard, and evolution doesn't care about anything except reproductive success.
Read it a few times to understand the core message because the thesis and title are slightly self-evident i.e. more isolation causes less socializing. But the crux seems to be:
> "We see individual elephants leaving and possibly dying at accelerating rates, but new individuals are not coming into the population,” said Madsen. “With fewer individuals in the population, those who are left will naturally have fewer relationships. However, the remaining elephants are also changing their relationships with each other."
In my opinion "dying at accelerating rates" is the/a key takeaway. Notably climate change doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned and hate to see poaching be a direct cause:
> Many elephant populations are already impacted through deaths resulting from poaching and conflicts with humans. Other contributing factors may be disruptions in habitat connectivity and less food available...
Other comments mention other intelligent and social species and this reminds me of Puget Sound Southern resident killer whales [0] and their decrease in food availability and offspring viability.
[0]: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-s...
There's a few reasons driving all of these things, and yes, climate change is largely not a top issue as it moves far too slow as compared to other reasons.
First, is that places where elephants live are facing increasing pressure from the outside due to human settlement. National parks established decades ago or longer have borders which face ever-increasing human populations right on them. Human-wildlife conflict and elephants raiding crops farmed right next to parks are incredibly commonplace.
Second, that national parks established decades ago in most places were not designed for wildlife corridors to connect the parks. The concept of a way for elephants to walk 100km or 200km to another park is a relatively new notion. So, already, roads, cities, railroads, etc. prevent long-range migration, if for no other reason than the landscape and water sources needed for those migrations are also great spots for people to get water and establish a town.
Third, that poaching has forced elephants to change their own patterns to consolidate. They are increasingly isolated because they now feel they need to form super-herds of 50-100 individuals just to survive in places lacking proper wildlife law enforcement. So the elephants themselves see more danger in leaving the herd than staying put, which obviously creates a genetic diversity issue, among other problems.
These are all very recent issues, maybe the last 50 years in some ways, but changes in behavior like super herds are maybe the last 10-15 years in certain areas.
Dying at accelerated rates could have a number of factors, including poaching, obviously, but also stress from being in areas where poaching happens frequently drives behavior changes that might not lead to long life spans. There could also (just a guess) that after CITES was established in the 1970s to limit the ivory trade, there might have been a relative population boom. Elephants have long life expectancy, and so you have the competing incentives of older elephants with longer tusks being poached more, competing for food more, and older elephants are cantankerous. If they get into a village to eat crops, they might be shot to prevent human death, or (as I've seen happen) might each a whole field of something recently sprayed with pesticide, which can and does kill elephants.
I want to back up this comment as covering the key points in both stresses on elephant populations and human understanding and focal points for conservation.
North Carolina Zoo has been involved in a program to radio collar elephants to track the herds. https://www.nczoo.org/saving-wildlife/conservation/internati...
One of my family members has been involved in this program since the 1990's. They try to anesthetize the matriarch and attach a gigantic collar while the elephan is knocked out. The anesthesia is fatal to the elephant without properly timed reversal agents. You can imagine what that means with a protective herd nearby.
The website mentioned above is obviously marketing copy from the zoo, but the program is impressive and has collected incredible data over the years. My favorite reality check to the marketing copy. One of the other articles from nczoo tells the narrative: "As we move through the forest, conscious of every foot fall, I notice the tracker suddenly throws up his hand, indicating to the team that we need to stop moving." Except the tracker actually drives -- and I'm not making this up -- a Harley Davidson.
Ultimately the sad truth is elephants need a lot of space and there is less and less available in the format they need as time goes on.
Human activity in sub-saharan Africa has increased >5x in the last fifty years or so, >10x since WW2.
To put it more succinctly, the successful vaccination policies applied in Africa back in the 1980s started it all, there are now a lot more humans living in Africa which means a lot less wildlife habitat.
Not at all. In fact, that's a pretty ghoulish take, which also somehow ignores both elephants and population booms in Asia.
First off, let's recall that for generations elephants were hunted for ivory by the West to make piano keys and billiard balls, among other things. So their populations were artificially low prior to vaccination campaigns.
Pressures from poaching and the difficulty of getting tourism dollars to local communities so they value the elephants are a large parts of the problem that have nothing to do with populations one way or another.
The majority of trade routes and planning in Africa are driven by natural resource extraction, not by population alone. Roads and rail largely focus on trade, and very often populations shift to either where they can find land to farm, or jobs. Encroachment on parks isn't because the rest of the country is full, it's because it's near enough to where people already life, and demand for food from towns that support tourism economies leads to the logical step of growing food near those parks. Would you really fly or truck tomatoes across Kenya or Zambia when they can be grown 2km from where they'll end up?
Enforcement of wildlife policies, and wildlife corridors that have been established usually falls to woefully under-resourced wildlife law enforcement officers that have a tough time keeping up with the poachers on patrols of hundreds of square kilometers a day. By the time a few families move beyond an imaginary line on a map, they might have been farming for months or years.
> "Notably climate change doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned"
If it'd be my study, I'd also avoid mentioning climate-change explicitly.
With the (US-governments') move from mere verbal denial of climate change to institutional and policy-level skepticism of everything and everyone just using the term, it could cause the whole paper to be dismissed in discussions of some circles...
As if "some circles" were going to do anything about declining elephant populations to begin with. "Obeying in advance" isn't going to save you, your paper, or the elephants.
(With the assumption that climate change is one of the causes.)
More problematically, it can cause the government to cut funding from your institution.
Human elephant conflict is not something we have solved here in Sri Lanka yet and I think that too contributes to the accelerating rates of deaths (Humans die too, in this conflict).
PS: The article addresses this
> Many elephant populations are already impacted through deaths resulting from poaching and conflicts with humans. Other contributing factors may be disruptions in habitat connectivity and less food available for the elephants as ecological conditions change across the 119-square-mile park and surroundings.
It's curious that no one has mentioned meat, egg and dairy consumption as the main drivers for loss of habitat and biodiversity yet. 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture and we need all that land for feeding the our livestock, which is outnumbering mammal wildlife by far.
94% of non-human mammal biomass is livestock.
Wanna help the elephants? Eat no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish. It's easy as that.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
My daughter is on a safari right now in Kenya. At one camp, an elephant came right up to the tents (she sent us a picture). This is apparently very common there. I wonder if the elephants are looking for social interaction, or maybe they know these tourist camps are safe from poachers.
I've been in that situation too. We found it quite scary, since Elephants can be dangerous! But we were also in awe, such a powerful and big creature.
(I think it just wanted to eat from the tree next to the tent)
How many big mammal remain in Europe and North america outside of livestock ? Africa is going the same way.
They just like us fr
Thought this was a joke about Mastodon at first ;D
The aptly named Mastodon, driven to extinction by Bluesky.
Nah. Blue Sky is mostly just slop while all the interesting people are on mastodon.
That's really a useful finding that helps to connect the dots in the rapidly changing overall ecosystem of biosphere on Earth. I thought this pattern of diminishing social groups is specific to humans. But as usual, the phenomenon appears broader and more generic.
Education, jobs, desire for better living conditions did the damage for humans. Families became workers of the economies and were flung far apart.
For elephants, their distress is probably a direct result of their need for social grouping. A wild cat wouldn't have been affected by the lack of social groups.
imagine we find out later that shifts in our socialisation isn't due to smartphones but some unknown factor that also affects intelligent animals...
I think we just come to grips with humans being an awful, parasitic, and destructive species, even towards ourselves
Humans are awful. Anyway, why won’t these humans hang out with each other? Awful, awful asocial beasts.
Or imagine we find out later that shifts in our radio waves are also affecting intelligent animals!
(like bees?)
Yes, EMF, environmental pollutants, more toxic metals going around (that used to be buried).
Not saying these are all likely, but especially the latter ones might play a small role.
E.g. polar bears and other predators have way higher retinol accumulations in their liver these days than 50 years ago, so apparently something is changing their metabolism.
hmmm check the mycelium
Well there are more microbes around us than there are stars in the universe. They survive without smart phones, intelligence, religion, society and stories that need to fit in a 3 inch chimp brain about the meaning of it all. One of them recently killed 6 million people. Life goes on.
> killed 6 million
Which one was that?
Covid-19, 7 million is the current official figure (excluding indirect deaths).
The elephants are spending too much time confiding in Claude?
Even bigger tusks, Claude
What a comforting thought, that killing off an intelligent species isn't really our fault.
Bit of an escapist fantasy, though.
Capitalism.
If I had to theorize, I'd put RF radiation (5G/4G/../WiFi) up there as the prime suspect. With water contaminated by hormones as a close second. Microplastics come in third place.
why put radio waves above hormones?
Because the hormones have been in the water supply since the mid 1960s, but cell phone towers are a more recent development. Plastic also dates back longer, we just didn't notice the microplastics earlier.
People putting a wifi router into their homes is even more recent than phone towers. Households I know only have wifi since the 2010s.
Radio transmitters in the 1960s sent out much more radio power.
The electromagnetic field is only in the vicinity of the sender. For Bluetooth it's a radius of about 15cm (6in). Wifi is around 3m (9ft) and cellular is around 5m (16ft).
The signal travels much farther, of course, but the electromagnetic radiation past these is negligible.
People did not have radio senders in their home, they only had receivers. But your mobile phone, wifi routers and Bluetooth headsets also are senders. Yes, many hobbyists had a radio set at home, but the antenna was usually mounted on the roof.
YC 26. Facebook, but for elephants. (Maybe pivot to doordash for lions?)
They're already depressed... why would you want to hurt them more?
To sell ads.
> Facebook, but for elephants.
Tuskbook?
> Maybe pivot to doordash for lions?
Rate your delivery driver on the score from "Too thin, won't eat again" to "Nice and juicy".
It's like when you starve them of resources they don't thrive. It does not compute, the line is going up.
It must be due to their social media, AI, and porn usage
...volentieri video games
They need to breed more extroverts
Is this about Elephants now having social media too and also getting Zuckerberg`ed ?
One thing is not like the other.
Glad to see things like this are being funded. It’s easy to forget we aren’t the only smart, social creatures on the planet dealing with this rapidly changing world.
Hat tip to the elephants for not being sociopaths like the Orca. Or otters.
Maybe the elephants and octopus should form a brilliant animals but not sociopaths club.
Elephants are a reminder of what we should choose to be. Orcas are what we deserve for what we have already chosen.
Might want to look up what teen/young adult African elephants are like, particularly absent a strong father and during musth. [1] Pretty much all noble savage myths, human or animal alike, end up indeed being myths. Life's hard, and evolution doesn't care about anything except reproductive success.
[1] - https://www.bbcearth.com/news/teenage-elephants-need-a-fathe...
Congratulations you will live in my existential nightmares now. Damn it.
Where do corvids figure in this spectrum?
They still can't handle the svn to git migration as they lost TRUNK