In elephants, the resilience of communities has its limits
Anastasia Madsen, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues analyzed 12 years of observations of wild Asian elephants in Sri Lanka.
Key points
- But a new study suggests that resilience may not keep the community intact when steady losses accumulate over time.
- They found that, once losses began to outpace newcomers, the elephants’ society didn’t just get smaller.
- Elephants live in some of the most complex and resilient societies in the animal kingdom.
Long-term studies of African savanna elephants have shown that, even after poaching or other spikes in deaths, survivors tend to rebuild their lost connections over time.
Individuals die or move away, calves grow up, and newcomers join, but the local communities as a whole usually hold together.
Additional details
- “Before that, it was basically a tropical deciduous forest,” said Shermin de Silva, an ecologist at UC San Diego and senior author of the study (de Silva started the Udawalawe Elephant Research Project in 2006).
- Accidental savanna Udawalawe National Park in southern Sri Lanka was created in the 1970s around a reservoir on one of the country's four major rivers.
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