The Samburu elephants are one of the world's best-studied populations. Intensive monitoring has revealed that more have been poached in the past 2.5 years than in the previous 11 years. The highest poaching rates ever were recorded in the first 5 months of this year.
Poaching of males has resulted in a population with more than double the number of females to males. Poachers are now also targeting adult females, resulting in the loss of one or more in most families and leaving roughly one in five groups with no mature females. The number of orphans in the population is increasing rapidly.
These changes correlate with a near tripling of the total number of seizures of illegal ivory in or coming from Kenya (see go.nature.com/k9bkwy) and with rising ivory prices. Local black-market ivory prices around Samburu have more than doubled since 2007, and are an order of magnitude greater than in 1990. At current local prices, the ivory of the largest male elephant poached in the Samburu population is equivalent to 1.5 years' salary for a wildlife ranger or 15 years' salary for an unskilled worker.
Ivory demand and prices have reached a point at which poachers are willing to target well-protected, closely monitored populations. With many poorly protected, soft-target elephant populations now over-harvested (P. Bouche et al. PLoS ONE 6, e20619; 2011), the pressure on the Samburu elephant population may be a harbinger of what is to come for Africa's protected areas.
Source: George Wittemyer, David Daballen, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Nature Journal, Vol 476.
George Wittemyer Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA.g.wittemyer@colostate.edu
David Daballen, Iain Douglas-Hamilton Save the Elephants, Nairobi, Kenya
Melissa Groo
Save the Elephants News Service Researcher
For further information on elephants please see Save the Elephants' web site
at http://www.savetheelephants.org
This Save the Elephants project is supported by the International Elephant Foundation. http://www.elephantconservation.org
