Saving the Herd, One Print at a Time: A 3D-printed Elephant and Its Potential for Conservation Efforts
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Here’s one of the problems with trying to 3D print a very, very accurate model of an elephant. The feet aren’t completely flat, so getting them to emerge in just the right way from filament, as the thin plastic printer thread is known, can be tricky.
Briana Schwieters ’26 understands this very well. Out of all the prints she has done for an elephant, until last week only one had been fully successful. So she was watching carefully as the latest version, this one as large as she could make it, began to appear in the printer (named “Augusta Savage” for the famous sculptor) on a recent Thursday. The UMass Makerspace was buzzing with students and projects, but supervisor Lauren Gobler took a moment to check Schwieters’ rendering.
“This looks very promising,” Gobler said with approval. Schwieters checked the time until the print would be complete: only 17 hours left to go.
As a post-graduate working in Professor Duncan Irschick’s lab, Schwieters knows how important accuracy is when it comes to these tiny models.
On September 21, this version of a 3D elephant—specifically, the scientifically accurate representation of a 1,500-pound bull elephant named Sarara—will be released to the public for use. The model is the culmination of a partnership with the nonprofit Save the Elephants and the latest effort by Irschick, professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, to promote conservation through models big and small.
In essence, Irschick’s work over the past decade has been to develop both the hardware and methodology for scanning live animals and the software to reconstruct them. The 199 models he’s built so far, and used to create an online 3D library, have been gathered in partnership with scientists, nonprofits, zoos and aquariums all over the world. The library includes creatures as diverse as a Caribbean reef shark from the Bahamas, a whale shark from Tanzania, and a Japanese giant salamander from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, a life-sized version of which lives on Irschick’s desk.
While some of the techniques can be reapplied, every animal creates a new challenge for Irschick and his students to scan. For a hammerhead shark, for example, they created a way to bring a 3D-array of cameras into the ocean depths, with a professional diver on hand to lure sharks through the rig.
“We're always trying to be really careful,” Irschick said recently, sitting in his office surrounded by small, colorful animal models. “You have an elephant or a polar bear that you’re catching from multiple dimensions and you're also trying to do it in a way that's safe for the animal.”
The scans, which are available as digital files online, are largely designed to be educational tools. Vets might use a scan to understand unique anatomy; a museum might print a life-sized model for display. Programs in Florida and Bermuda use prints of 3D turtles and sharks, respectively, to educate school children and familiarize them with local creatures. Commercial use of these 3D prints is also possible, but comes with certain restrictions.
“It's understood that they will use the animal consistent with the natural history of the animal,” said Irschick, who doesn’t want his models used in movies or video games to depict outrageously aggressive encounters, for example.
The technology Irschick continues to evolve has scientific implications beyond printing. One clear application is in estimating size. If 3D scans can be used to evaluate an animal’s weight in a noninvasive way, then scientists might be able to avoid the cost and stress of such efforts as tranquilizing and weighing an animal in the wild. Getting weight estimates in real time could be particularly valuable with elephants, where hungry herds are prone to coming into conflict with humans by invading farm fields when food is scarce.
“If you could just fly over a herd of elephants and say this is how much each one weighs…it would tell you a lot about the health of the animals,” said Irschick, adding of the latest project. “That's what we want to do with this model. It's going be the foundation for all that work.”
He recalled how, when it came to scanning the bull elephant used for the latest 3D scan, the effort went surprisingly smoothly. As the team circled him in vehicles with GoPros, Sarara, a famous 33-year-old male from Northern Kenya’s Samburu region, stepped right through. “We were able to get fantastic footage,” said Irschick.
The work of printing Sarara took on new urgency when the beloved animal was killed in a conflict with locals several weeks after the project was complete.
To better understanding elephants like Sarara, Irschick plans to continue the project by visiting the San Diego Zoo, his long-time partner organization, to scan their herd of 13 elephants in October. The goal will be to use those animals as further templates aimed at conservation.
“If people get more used to what the animals actually are and what they do,” he said, “they become more invested in wanting to keep them around.”