Some Elephants in Africa Are Just a Step From Extinction - The New York Times - 0 views
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A key conservation group counted the continent’s elephants as two species for the first time, highlighting the dire threat to forest elephants.
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The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants in recent decades, according to a new I.U.C.N. Red List assessment of African elephants released Thursday.
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The new assessment is the first in which the conservation union treats Africa’s forest and savanna elephants as two species instead of one.
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Both are in bad shape. The last time the group assessed African elephants, in 2008, it listed them as vulnerable. Now it says savanna elephants are endangered, one category worse.
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Alfred Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the I.U.C.N.’s recognition of two African elephant species was a little tardy. More than two decades ago, a study of 295 skulls in museums found “enormous differences” between the two types of elephants, he said.
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The shy forest elephants have lost nearly nine-tenths of their number in a generation and are now critically endangered — just one step from extinction in the wild.
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Dr. Okita said that considering the two elephant species separately was helping to reveal just how bad things are, especially for the forest elephant.
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Even during those few decades, the changes were drastic. The population of savanna elephants has fallen at least 60 percent, the team found. Forest elephants have declined by more than 86 percent.
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It will be especially hard for forest elephants to bounce back, Dr. Roca added, because of how long they wait to reproduce — six years longer than the savanna elephants.
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As they knock down trees and chew up huge amounts of plant material, both forest and savanna elephants change their environments in ways that create new habitat for other species.
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Savanna elephants are “thriving,” Dr. Okita said, in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, which overlaps five countries in southern Africa. In some parts of Gabon and the Republic of Congo, forest elephant populations have stabilized or even grown. Where people are protecting elephants against poachers and planning land use carefully, Dr. Okita said, there has been progress