Guide The Tree Elephants

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For years, scientists have debated how big a role elephants play in toppling trees in South African savannas.​ Using high resolution 3-D mapping, Carnegie scientists have for the first time quantitatively determined tree losses across savannas of Kruger National Park.
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Fatal attraction: Elephants and marula fruit

The African savanna elephant holds the prize for largest living terrestrial animal, and now it apparently just set another land record: the longest distance mover of seeds. The pachyderms can transport seeds up to 65 kilometers, according to a study of elephant dung in South Africa. Plants make fruit to encourage animals to eat and then move their seeds to new locations.

Not only does this help expand the plant population, it also prevents seedlings from competing with their parents or suffering from any pathogens that may have accumulated in their home turf. Seeds lucky enough to be eaten by a large animal drop onto their new habitat encased in a big lump of nutrients. For some species, passing through the digestive tract of an animal increases the percentage of seeds that sprout.

The Elephant Sanctuary - African Elephant Flora Downs a Tree

There seem to be other benefits as well; elephant dung, for example, somehow protects seeds from predation by beetles. Katherine Bunney became interested in the role of elephants in moving seeds while a graduate student in ecology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She had read about large fruit in Central and South American forests that falls to the ground and rots because it evolved to be eaten by large herbivores now extinct.

The first thing that Bunney needed to know was how long seeds stay inside elephants while winding through their meter-long intestines. For a week, she fed fruit to four elephants in a sanctuary near Kruger National Park in South Africa. She gave them honeydew melons because their smaller, softer seeds are relatively easy to distinguish from the seeds of the tree fruit the elephants were already eating.

Keepers followed each elephant during the day, bagging the dung and bringing it back to Bunney, who sorted through hundreds of kilograms and counted the melon seeds. It took a sharp eye, because the seeds were stained the same olive green as the rough, dry dung.

Living with Elephants in Thailand

The elephants, she found, defecated most of the seeds within 33 hours, while the last ones plopped out after 96 hours. Among seed dispersers on the savanna black , elephants are the champs in how far they can move seeds, as measured and inferred by researchers. Berzaghi said. Berzaghi and his colleagues selected two field sites.


  1. Harpers Round Table, June 18, 1895.
  2. Site Index!
  3. Study shows elephants play key role in tree losses across savanna?
  4. Come Back Yesterday.

One lies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from which elephants disappeared 30 years ago because of poaching; the other is the Republic of Congo, where elephants lived at high numbers until recently. Both sites were relatively pristine and differed only in the presence or absence of elephants. The researchers measured the trunk size of all the trees in the study areas and noted the species, giving them an idea of the short-term effects of elephant loss. To determine the long-term effects, they created a computer model that simulated the basic functions of the African rain forest, including tree growth and death, competition, photosynthesis and reproduction.

Forest elephants could soon disappear

The model allowed them to include or exclude elephants. Forest elephants almost exclusively stomp down trees with a diameter of 12 inches or less, and they prefer to eat fast-growing softwood trees. By clearing the understory of vegetation, the researchers found, elephants not only alter plant composition but also affect light penetration and water availability. The ants in question were a species that is known to damage trees and is presumed to impair tissue healing. Though such fires are surely harmful to healthy trees, it seems, in an example of two negatives making a positive, as if they are actually helpful to sick ones.

Study finds elephants plant trees, play big role in forest structure

This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "A tale of elephants, ants, trees and fire shows how complex nature is". Reuse this content The Trust Project. More from Science and technology Palaeontology New Zealand was once a land of giants.


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