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Elephants without Borders

Katy Huston for TEI

In the U.S., you ’d be hard pressed to find an elephant outside of a zoo. In parts of Africa, though, humans and elephants are increasingly coming into conflict and competing for land and resources.

That’s one problem that Curt Griffin, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and Alfred Kikoti, a doctoral candidate, hope to address by studying elephant population status, ecology and transboundary movements in northern Botswana and northern Tanzania.

Why elephants? “They’re one of the most magnificent mammals in the world,” Griffin says. “They’re highly intelligent, highly social, incredibly smart.”

“Elephants are there in the village. They don’t leave,” says Kikoti who is from Tanzania, where his nickname is Tembo – Swahili for elephant. “We find that elephants are in one tiny area that’s surrounded by farms. If they want to go to another area, they have to pass through people’s gardens,” he says.

Vanessa Emerson, an undergraduate Veterinary and Animal Science major who has gone to Tanzania twice to work in the corridor and help with research, helps Professor Griffin measure a bull during collaring.

In 1999, Griffin began doing aerial surveys of elephants and other wildlife in northern Botswana to determine their seasonal distribution and abundance. Two years later he started attaching satellite collars to elephants in order to understand their movements, both within countries and across borders.

Kikoti joined Griffin in 2004 after completing his master’s degree research on elephants at Aberystwyth University in Wales. His research focuses on elephant-human conflict in Tanzania, where both the elephant and human populations are increasing.

As a result, humans and elephants are competing for habitat and resources. “Most of the areas that elephants like, humans also like,” he says. “The area with the marsh, the wetlands, the people want to go there and start growing rice, and the elephants also want to go there to use the marshes for wallowing and feeding.”

Are they violent towards humans? “No, but that size – you don’t want to be too close to that,” Kikoti says. People have even been killed by elephants, although it is usually because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Sometimes kids don’t even go to school because they’re scared of the elephants,” he says.

Botswana has also seen a surge in elephant population – over 165,000 in northern Botswana alone with a growth rate of 4 percent per year, which threatens to damage communities or national parks. Griffin’s research aims to provide the Botswanan government with the ecological information they need to better develop their elephant management programs.

Working in Africa is tough. Often, there are no roads and very rough terrain, and the logistics of organizing vehicles, fuel, supplies and helicopters in remote areas are daunting. Cooperation with local organizations and communities is imperative.

And tagging an elephant is certainly no easy task. “We prefer to dart them from a helicopter,” says Griffin. He and his team identify the sex and age of the animal they want to tag, and a veterinarian takes care of the tranquilizing.

“You get within 12 to 15 feet of this elephant running through the bus, lean out the helicopter’s open door, and they dart it,” he says.

Once the tranquilizers kick in, collaring an elephant takes 10 or 15 minutes. “Then we give it a reversal drug, and we run like crazy. They wake up a lot quicker than they go down,” he says.

Alfred Kikoti, right, a Ph.D. student in the department of Natural Resources and Conservation, helps Griffin collar an elephant.

So far, Griffin has tagged about 45 elephants in Southern Africa, in Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Zambia. Since 2005, he and Kikoti have also tagged 23 in Tanzania. The collars last about two years, and help identify the corridors elephants use to move across the landscape.

At UMass, Griffin gets regular satellite downloads of the elephants’ locations, which he plots on a map. He returns to Africa once or twice a year for several weeks, and he’s also taken groups of undergraduate students overseas to learn about wildlife conservation and park management.

Griffin and Kikoti are both so passionate about elephants that along with former Ph.D. student Mike Chase, who researched elephants in northern Botswana, they established a private nonprofit group two years ago called Elephants Without Borders. The organization collaborates with several other conservation organizations, including the African Wildlife Foundation and Conservation International, to spearhead preservation of the species.

“Elephants Without Borders is really dedicated to understanding the ecology of these magic animals, but also trying to promote conservation programs that protect elephants,” says Griffin. “How can communities and people learn to live alongside elephants? How can we reduce that conflict so there’s less problems for people and less problems for elephants?”

Kikoti’s work has already affected policy in Tanzania. He established the first wildlife conservation corridor in Tanzania, which links elephant across the border into Kenya’s Amboseli Reserve. He’s also established a local network, which works with communities to do patrols and reduce elephant poaching in rural areas and fosters support for wildlife preservation.

Although elephants in a village can create conflict, having elephants nearby can attract game drives and tourism and bring much-needed income to poor communities. Instead of forcing people to leave, Kikoti hopes to convince people that moving out of main migration corridors to locations nearby can eliminate conflict and create jobs. “Instead of seeing it as a beast, you can see it as a resource, something that will bring some cash to the village,” he says.

Right now he’s crunching data, which he hopes will encourage resettlement. “Someone has to move, and the easiest species to move is the humans,” he says.

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