- Summary
- Objectives
- Status
- Project Publications
Summary
Through this project we aimed to conserve individuals and populations of Asian elephants that persist in human‐dominated landscapes, through a change in human perception of the elephant as ‘the farmer and architect of the landscape’ and not a marauder of villages and by ensuring that people are more empathetic towards the elephants they share space with by knowing and acknowledging that elephants, like us humans, are highly social, intelligent and most importantly empathetic beings.
Objectives
1. Sustained long‐term monitoring of the changing lives of the elephants
Status
- We monitored elephants in the Ramanagara and Channapatna Forest Divisions and in the Bannerghatta National Park in Karnataka through camera traps and direct observations. With the onset of summer, we witnessed reduction in the availability of water. Animals frequently came to the remaining waterbodies to quench their thirst and cool off providing us the opportunity to get numerous images of elephants.
- In Ramnagara and Channapatna, we almost exclusively saw male elephants, most of whom moved around in all‐male groups, consistent with our findings that young male elephants associated with older ones to navigate through an unknown environment or risky situations. In contrast, at Bannerghatta, where water was more easily available, we frequently saw herds at the water bodies.
- With the development of irrigation and a longer growing season, we found elephants staying longer in these landscapes. This, however, also results in an increase in conflict as elephants sometimes leave the forest to feed on agricultural crops.
- Long term monitoring of individual elephants helped us determine social associations between individuals. Understanding social structure is important because it influences gene flow, spatial pattern, communication, learning between individuals and could even affect elephants’ interactions with humans.
- Three masters students joined us for their internship during which time they used the camera trap data to study a) how elephants interact with herbivores at point resources and their spatial and temporal differences in resource sharing; b) their spatio-temporal distribution and behaviour during musth; and c) how elephants are distributed historically during the wet and dry seasons.