Elephants roaming the parched plains of Africa's national parks can get up to half their food by risky midnight raids into crop fields, according to scientists who tracked a herd by satellite monitoring.
Conservationists working for Save the Elephants Foundation in Kenya hope that by understanding the elephants' behavior, they can improve ways of protecting farmers against damage caused by the animals, and in turn protect the elephants from angered farmers.
"When an elephant raids a crop field, it can be devastating for a farmer. Sometimes the elephants are spotted and shot in the act," said Henrik Rasmussen, a conservationist at Oxford University who took part in the study.
The scientists tracked a herd of seven elephants by fitting them with GPS satellite tags as they wandered through the Samburu national reserve in Kenya. Tension between the local population and elephants has worsened in recent years as small-scale farmers have encroached on the parkland to grow crops.
By combining information on the elephants' movements with chemical tests on hairs plucked from their tails, the researchers recreated the elephants' routes and also worked out what they ate along the way.
The tail hair of six of the elephants indicated that they spent most of their time in the arid lowlands of Samburu eating trees and shrubs. During the rainy season they switched to grasses.
The seventh elephant, named Lewis, was different. He spent rainy seasons in lowland Samburu, but then trekked 40km to the Imenti Forest, 2,000m above sea level on Mount Kenya. From here, he made repeated night-time raids into subsistence farms during the dry period from mid-June to mid-August. Tests on tail hairs suggest that between a third and a half of Lewis's food intake was corn from the farmland, according to the report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published on Monday.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton, president of the foundation and the study's lead author, said crop raids are extremely dangerous.
"It is a high-risk, high-gain strategy, and in our elephant's case it did not pay off. Shortly after the research was done, Lewis suffered multiple gunshots, very likely as a result of crop raiding," he said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not