Gorongosa National Park, in Central Mozambique, was once known for concentrating some of the densest wildlife populations in all Africa. After a 16-year civil war, 95 percent of the park’s large mammals, such as elephants, lions, buffalos, hippopotamus and zebras had been decimated by soldiers and a famished population hunting them for ivory, fur and meat. As part of a huge wildlife restoration project, some of the top scientists in the world are in Gorongosa studying the park’s biodiversity in order to coordinate strategies to protect it.
CLOSER met the world’s top elephant expert Joyce Poole during our visit to Gorongosa National Park – which currently includes over four thousand square kilometers of protected area. We found Joyce at the park’s science research center, where she invited us to join her on a safari to observe the elephants. On the same day, in the afternoon, we met at the park gate with Poole and our guide, Zimbabwean Simba Munyambo, waiting to drive us through the acacia tree forest in search of wild elephants.
“I started studying elephants in 1975, it’s already 40 years,” says Poole, who explains she began coming to Gorongosa in 2011. Since then, she has noticed a difference. Elephants are coming down closer to the Chitengo safari camp that accommodates visitors and tourists.
ELEPHANTS: THE SAVANNAH’S ARCHITECTS
We are sitting in the back of a roofless safari car observing Simba and Poole as they look for elephant tracks on the ground, footprints and fresh dung – which can indicate they are nearby, the elephant researcher explains. Suddenly, Simba stops the car: there is a young 15-year-old male just off the main dirt-track hidden behind the trees. Another two come closer.
“Those two are younger and they are a bit nervous, they feel insecure when they don’t have their mothers around,” explains Poole. “They are quite afraid of people, so sometimes their fear comes out by running away or it comes out by attacking. When an elephant charges they do a lot of dusting and throwing,” she adds.
Gorongosa’s elephants are wild and are not used to tourists. As humans have always been predators, they sometimes react to vehicles, by running away or making defensive displays, like trumpeting and mock-charging. One of Poole’s missions in the Mozambican park is to develop a process of familiarisation of Gorongosa’s elephants with tourist vehicles.
A few kilometers ahead and we meet a herd of elephants. The scientist explains that elephants have a “very intricate and complex way of group defense of the family members. They communicate with one another, they bunch together and then, when they are in a bunch, they start talking with each other, gesturing. Based on that communication they create a plan of action for running away or charging.
“I am trying to understand how they make those decisions. And what the signals to the other elephants are. We have identified over 200 hundred postures and gestures and what they mean,” Poole says.
The American scientist, born in Germany, and raised in Kenya, also stresses the role of the elephants as the “ecosystem’s engineers and architects” .
“Elephants are like hippos in the sense they are what we call the architects of the savannah, they are capable of changing the whole ecosystem – like we [humans] are,” she says.
Poole explains that elephants don’t sit and eat, they keep moving.
“They knock down trees, so they let that area grow again, and that provides habitat for other animals and creatures, it opens up the forest, it provides new ceilings and chances to grow.”
As a result, the disappearance of the elephants has devastating consequences for the ecosystem. These huge mammals have an important role as seed dispersers – by eating, transporting and spreading them through their dung – as landscape engineers for grazing animals and as tourist attractions, helping to develop the local economy.
THE GENE FOR TUSKLESSNESS
Joyce Poole is currently studying the Gorongosa National Park’s elephants, identifying every individual, their age and gender, what family groups they belong to and where they go, in order to learn and help make better decisions on how to protect them. She is also monitoring the lingering effects of Mozambique’s 16-year-long civil war on the elephants, examining how it has impacted the population’s sex-ratio, age structure and the degree of tusklessness.
“There were about one hundred native survivors, an estimate, so a huge proportion of the population was killed. As a result many elephants here are tuskless. Most of the females don’t have tusks,” she says.
Elephants carry a sex-linked gene for tusklessness, so in most populations there are always some tuskless elephants, explains Poole.
Whereas baseline tusklessness in a population “might be two to four percent,” over time as more and more tusked elephants are killed then “there is a distortion of that ratio, so that’s how we have ended up with so much tusklessness”.
In heavily poached populations, the ratio of tuskless animals in the population increases as poaching continues. The percentage may increase to 60 percent in the older animals, she says.
“When this group breeds with tuskless females, you begin to see the gene for tusklessness spreading in the population. It’s inherited. You can see this in almost any population that has experienced a wave of heavy poaching, like here in Gorongosa”.
Poole believes it is possible that these elephants have survived in Gorongosa because they are tuskless.
“At least they are more protected when they are tuskless, at least they are not poached,” she notes.
An October 2014 aerial wildlife survey counted 535 elephants in the park.
“They are now going to increase naturally,” Poole says.
Over several decades, researchers have documented an increase in the percentage of tuskless males and females in a number of elephant populations. Decades of poaching and overhunting of large tusked elephants may be leading to generations of elephants with smaller tusks – or no tusks at all.
Poaching, hunting and conflict with people, are currently the main threats to the elephants.
“Many countries now in Africa are really suffering from elephant poaching for ivory,” stresses the researcher.
On the other hand, the pressure on the landscape is enormous, so “we have to take and fight for every inch right now,” she adds.
A GLIMMER OF HOPE
While a huge wildlife restoration project is currently being implemented in Gorongosa by a team of Mozambicans and international experts – with the elephant population increasing slowly – in other parts of the country poaching continues to devastate and decimate the elephants.
In May of 2015, a survey led by the Government of Mozambique, in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), showed a dramatic 48 percent decline in elephant numbers in Mozambique in the previous five years, from over 20,000 to an estimated 10,300.
Throughout the continent, the population of elephants fell by more than half, from 1.3 million in 1979 to about 625,000 in 1989. Since the African Elephant Status Report 2007 – which estimated a range between 472,000 and 690,000 elephants – there has been a reduction in the number of elephants to 401,650, according to the most recent data, from 2013, published by International Union for Conservation of Nature’s African Elephant Specialist Group.
The African elephant was classified as an endangered species and global trade in ivory was banned in order to try to save the elephants in 1989, by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). But a highly profitable black market has risen to supply the demand, with China being the world’s largest ivory market and Hong Kong rising as an important hub for the illegal trade.
Remarkably, in September 2015, United States President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached a consensus on wildlife trafficking.
“The United States and China commit to enact nearly complete bans on ivory import and export, including significant and timely restrictions on the import of ivory as hunting trophies, and to take significant and timely steps to halt the domestic commercial trade of ivory”, says an official statement released by the White House press secretary.
This deal is considered the most significant step yet in efforts to shut down an industry that has fueled the illegal hunting of elephants, putting some species at risk.
In December 2015, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, one of the world’s most renowned elephant conservationists and founder of Save the Elephants, was quoted by The Washington Post as saying he believed President Xi Jinping’s pledge to ban the domestic trade in ivory had been “crucially important in driving down demand”.
While he said he was excited by the leadership being shown by China and the United States, he added it was “really vital” that Xi’s promise is put into law as soon as possible.
A positive step in the war against poaching was also taken by Hong Kong. During his 2016 policy address, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying promised to take steps to totally ban the sale of ivory in Hong Kong, according to media reports. As to when the total ban will come into force, the details are not yet known. Leung said that they will do it “as quickly as we can,” phasing out the local trade, which will hopefully have knock-on effects in other markets.
GORONGOSA: “ECOLOGICALLY THE MOST DIVERSE PARK IN THE WORLD”
Established in 1920, initially as an hunting reserve,and, later, in 1960, as a national park, Gorongosa was once a popular destination for Hollywood celebrities including John Wayne, Joan Crawford and Gregory Peck.
In 1976 – a year after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal – aerial surveys of the park and adjacent Zambezi River delta counted 6,000 elephants and about 500 lions, the largest lion population recorded in the region to date.
During the civil war (1977 – 1992) 95 percent of the large mammals such as elephants, lions, buffalos, hippos, as well as leopards and various antelopes, were killed for ivory, fur and meat.
In 1994, the first wildlife survey after the conflict counted only 100 elephants, less than 10 lions and a few hundred different specimens of antelopes, such as reedbuck, waterbuck and a handful of zebra.
In 2004, the Government of Mozambique and the Carr Foundation, a United States non-profit organization, founded by the American multimillionaire and philanthropist Greg Carr, started working together in the management of the Gorongosa National Park. In 2008, after a three-year trial period, both parties established a 20-year partnership and launched the Gorongosa Restoration Project, headed by Greg Carr. Over more than a decade, the American philanthropist has already invested tens of millions in the restoration of the park, as well as towards the sustainable development of the communities surrounding the protected area. Gorongosa has reintroduced species to the ecosystem, planted more than three million trees in the Mount Gorongosa rainforest, created a science research center, and currently provides health and education programs to the local communities living near the park’s borders. Greg Carr hopes to also attract many tourists to the park. “Not only because this magical place will thrill visitors, but also because their presence and activity will create much-needed economic activity in central Mozambique,” says the president of Gorongosa Restoration Project.
In 2011, Harvard University research professor and one of the world’s foremost voices on biodiversity conservation, Edward Osborne Wilson stated that “Gorongosa is ecologically the most diverse park in the world”. Gorongosa National Park’s scientists are currently conducting a comprehensive inventory of all forms of life in the Gorongosa ecosystem, considered by the researchers as a “critical task towards effective restoration and maintenance of this unique protected area”.
JOYCE POOLE
FOCUS ON THE PROTECTION AND WELFARE OF ELEPHANTS
Joyce Poole is an American, born in Germany in 1956, and raised in Kenya. She began studying African elephants at the age of 19, as a member of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project. The Amboseli research became the focus of Poole’s undergraduate honors thesis at Smith College in1979, her Cambridge University doctoral dissertation in 1982, as well as her post-doctoral research at Princeton University from 1984 to 1988. She went on study vocal communication and in 1985, together with another researcher, discovered that African elephants communicate using sounds below the level of human hearing.
In the late 1980s, as ivory poaching intensified, Poole’s focus shifted to elephant conservation. From 1990 to 1994 she headed the Elephant Program of Kenya Wildlife Service, where she was responsible for elephant conservation and management throughout Kenya. Thereafter, she returned to Amboseli to continue research into elephant communication. In 2000, with her husband, Petter Granli, she founded “Elephant Voices”, a non-profit organization dedicated to the protection and welfare of elephants through research and the sharing of knowledge. In 2011, Poole was invited to Gorongosa National Park to assess the elephant population and to begin a process of habituation of Gorongosa’s elephants to tourist vehicles.
