Snapshot Elephants for Africa

Elephants for Africa (EFA) is a UK charity and Botswana registered NGO, conducting research primarily on male African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana, hereafter referred to as elephant) social behavior and group dynamics. In the past the vast majority of research into elephant sociality has focused on female society and group behavior, whilst males were written off as being solitary and antisocial. Nowadays there is a growing realization that male elephants are also social and spend time living in groups, however these social groups are very different from female breeding herds, and are a lot less well understood.

EFA collect long-term data on interactions and associations between individual bull elephants, which are identified using ear notch patterns and tusk morphology. We conduct our research in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park (MPNP), in Botswana. The MPNP elephant population is of interest to us as it consists of predominantly bull elephants – over 95% of the elephants that we record are transient males. Therefore it is an ideal place to study the social behavior of the all-male groups found in this “bull area”. We are interested in understanding more about the social behavior of these males because we believe that the dynamic, fission-fusion nature of their interactions may influence behavior later in life, especially in terms of dominance hierarchies and behaviors such as crop raiding. Understanding male elephant social behavior, how it might differ in areas dominated by bulls from breeding herd areas, and what impact social interactions have on learning, dominance hierarchies and information transfer is also fundamental to being able to predict responses to changing ecological conditions and human encroachment.

To supplement our focal sighting data, EFA set up a network of camera traps which were running from 2014, until April 2017. These camera traps were located on elephant highways, well-worn pathways created by elephants, leading to the Boteti River in the MPNP. By monitoring elephant movement along these highways, we can investigate the demographics and group sizes of elephants using the highways, as well as their movement patterns in relation to factors such as time of day, season, river level, cropping season and moon phase. In addition, camera traps allow us an opportunity to investigate how group size and demographics may differ between day and night, as our driven research transects only take place during the day. From personal observation, it would also seem that the few female elephant breeding herds that are in the MPNP often drink from the river at night, and so may be under-represented in our transect data collection. Therefore camera traps are also an ideal tool to allow us to monitor the presence of breeding herds in the area.

Elephants are known as a “keystone species”; they can modify and maintain their habitat, often to the benefit of other species in the ecosystem. One way in which they can do this is by creating pathways in the environment, such as the elephant highways leading to the river. Our camera trap study also aims to investigate the spatial and temporal use of elephant highways, not only by elephants but also by other species. Our camera trap data forms a large part of our MPNP species monitoring and provides data on species composition within the park that are generally less easily obtainable from research drives and personal observation. Camera traps provide an effective method for collecting long-term data on the population demographics of species within the MPNP. Seasonal and annual changes in species populations, based on the frequency of their capture on our camera traps, can provide useful information about ecological changes in the park. Camera traps also have the added advantage of recording data continually, therefore can record the frequency of nocturnal species sightings and of the more elusive species that are rarely recorded during our transect drives. No other species monitoring of this nature is currently taking place in the MPNP, and so this important information will be fed back to the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, who manage the Park.

Various habitat types are found in the MPNP (Figure 1). A belt of tall, dense riparian Acacia woodland with a lower canopy of densely vegetated shrubland extends 2-5km from the riverbed. Moving further east, away from the river, the vegetation becomes more open Acacia savannah-type shrubland, and shrubbed grasslands. Further east still, the deep Kalahari sands give way to calcareous sandy loams, which support Schmidtia grasslands, with isolated stands of palm trees (Hyphaena petersiana). Finally, in the south east of the MPNP are the salt pans which give the Park its name, that form a mosaic with pan grasslands (Brooks, 2005).

Figure 1. Map of habitat types in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park (from Hemson 2003).

References
Brooks, C. J. (2005) The foraging behaviour of Burchell’s zebra (Equus burchelli antiquorum). (Unpublished Ph.D thesis). University of Bristol, Bristol, England.

Hemson, G. (2003) The ecology and conservation of lions: human–wildlife conflict in semi-arid Botswana. (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis). University of Oxford, Oxford, England.

Pitfield, A. (2017) The social and environmental factors affecting the life of bull African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in a ‘bull area’ – a social network analysis. (Unpublished Masters thesis). University of Bristol, Bristol, England.