Okay, so good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everyone present here. Friends of Elephants in collaboration with Gajah Conservation Trust present today's talk on elephants in Anthropocene. For many of you who don't know what are Friends of Elephants, we are not an organization or not proposing to be one.
We are an informal group of people with various expertise concerned about elephants and other wildlife. This group is a forum for disseminating knowledge linked to elephants and other wildlife science, conservation and welfare through art, culture, literature, movies, talks and discussion panels. We have been conducting these events as offline since April 2014 and online events from 2022. Our expectation is that people who have attended our events formally or informally participate or help in developing appropriate conservation and welfare measures for wildlife, including elephants.
Now, the flow of event is that today we'll have a wonderful session on elephants and Anthropocene by Dr. Sherman, followed by a conversation between Dr. Medina and Dr. Sherman on elephant ecosystems during their evolution and now. And finally, we'll conclude our session by Q&A session moderated by Dr. Shrikhar Srivastava. I'm Rhea Ghariai, your host for tonight. I'm a geospatial researcher with a wide range of interests, including climate change, forest ecology, and wildlife. I hold a master's degree in geoinformatics from BIT Meshra, specialized in bamboo forest mapping.
Currently, I'm working with Karnataka Forest Division to map... elephant distribution areas across entire states. Now we move on to our first talk on elephants in the ant super scene by Dr. Sherman.
I welcome Dr. Sherman Silva. She is a professor in ecology and behavior and evolution at University of California San Diego, which is a home for human nature's lab. It's a US-based non-profit organization focused on evolution and conservation of animals and their habitat. Her research ranges from behavioral ecology to interactions mostly focused on large animals. She holds a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is a project in Sri Lanka which she initiated in 2005. She is a member of Asian Elephants Group of Iocene Species.
the survival commission. I welcome you ma'am and the stage is yours. Hello, hi everyone can you hear me and can you see me?
Yes Dr. Shanmugam, we can clearly hear you and see you. Okay great, so let me just screen share and let me first put up this slide. Elephants, as we all know, are part of a very diverse clade of proboscideans that existed before the Pleistocene for millions of years across all continents.
But today are represented by just these three living species, the Asian elephant and the African savannah and forest elephants. Now, when I was a graduate student, I was mystified by something that I read that we probably all heard that Asian elephants, if you go by their teeth, Asian elephants are more adapted to a grazing diet than African elephants. based on these lamellae, which are the raised ridges on their moulders. So African elephants have these diamond-shaped lozenge-shaped, what they're called, lamellae, which they're named after, Loxodonta.
And elephants have these very parallel ridges, and this supposedly is for more of a grass-based diet. And if you observe them behaviorally, they actually seem to bear that out, where Loxodonta do a lot more browsing. And forest elephants are a lot more forgivers than elephants, which Asian elephants tend to even though they are both generalists and they both have very varied diets, Asian elephants really do like grasses and monocots.
And so why this difference? This puzzled me because Asian elephants, we typically think of them as more forest-living species and savannah elephants, you know, as they're named, they live in savannas, which we think of as being grasslands. So why would they have these reverse diets? Now, going back for those of you who... may or may not be familiar, right?
The time span that separates Asian elephants and African elephants is about 6 million years. And for perspective on that, that's about comparable to the time span that separates humans and chimpanzees, as well as the big cats. So this isn't a minor, you know, span of evolutionary time. It's pretty major.
And the two lineages, even though they look similar and we kind of, you know, treat them as being similar. they are not potentially they have a potential to be as different as lions and tigers and and leopards and over this long evolutionary history like i said uh they weren't the only ones around so uh all proboscideans originally evolved out of africa and then spread throughout the continents and um and as you know there were elephants even even in north america and europe and then there are their relatives ago Zaria were in South America. And over this period of time, they diversified.
And how this happened was actually for a very long time in the evolutionary history, when they were restricted to Africa, they were pretty much like this hippo-like creatures, not very big, not very diverse. And then 20 million years ago, the African continent ran into the Eurasian plate. And that's what allowed them to sort of escape Africa, so to speak. And once they did that...
They acquired these very diverse forms. And a couple of recent studies have shown, you know, there's been this old debate of, you know, why did this really diverse, very successful lineage go extinct? Was it climate change?
Was it hunting? And, you know, when we look at these different species, often with elephants, the tusks get all the attention. And people think about poaching and ivory and everything.
But. to really understand elephants and their ways of life, you have to look at their molars. The molars tell you profound stories because molars are what do all the work.
They are what the elephants used to eat. And so when you look at the molars, you can tell a lot about diet. And so on the left-hand side here, you see that little small looking creature that was their early ancestor. And it had a more browse adapted diet and some of these as you go along to the right more recent and on the far far right you have uh paleolexodon was a graze adapted species so it was committed grazer now if you look at this variation in the teeth that that's an evolutionary span of 60 million years being represented here and lots of different dietary habits and choices but if you look at which is a second one from the left which is really tall right you realize that it's pretty much a committed browser it has to browse its neck doesn't you know and its trunk potentially doesn't reach the ground it's like a giraffe right so it pretty much has to browse and this increasing browsing is indicated by increasing hypsodont which is the crown height you can see the molars are getting taller and that's because grass is really abrasive and it's acquiring more and more lamellae or those ridges and so those are indications of them being brazen So in this study, which was published in 2021 in Nature Ecology Abolition, authors reviewed a whole bunch of lineages and their dietary habits and when they went extinct. And, you know, at the height of proboscide and diversity, which was about 8 to 10 million years ago, if I recall, there were species that were sympatric.
They were living like there were multiple elephant species living in a particular habitat. But they find that this decline started. with climate change and it started long before humans and our hunting pressure were really an effect and obviously later on as humans became more of a hunter and spread out throughout the continents it had an effect but the reduction in proboscity and diversity actually happened way before that.
Now why did that happen? And then there's another study, set of studies, by Adrian Lister, some of you might know him, he's a member of the Asian... He does this wonderful study. specifically he looks at the change in in the uh the sort of the environment versus what soil attribute and you can look at the carbon isotopes content in paleosol to see whether they're primarily C3 or C4 plants. And you can see that around 20 million years ago, you have a signature that is more representative of forest and that coincides with a lot of species being reliant on a browse type of diet.
And then it starts shifting towards a more woodland mixture and then grassland type of dominated environment. And that shift happens between eight to five million years ago. And that paleosol shift, you see those dots kind of tracking to the right. Now, if you look at the, so that's what's happening in the environment.
And then if you look at what the animals were eating, and based on the tooth enamel, that's the middle panel, and the different shapes are different species of herbocidaeans and relatives, you see that they also start tracking to the right. But then there's this middle part where, you know. If you look at the far panel, which is the Hipsodonti index, and that tells you morphologically whether the teeth were adapted for a browse-based diet, you see that there's this discrepancy between the middle panel and the far right panel, where the middle panel, they start eating stuff, and then it goes into their tooth enamel.
And so you can see the isotopic signature of their diet in the tooth enamel. They're eating more of a grass-based diet. But the Hipsodonti index is showing that it's still...
pretty much a browser-like tooth. These are browsing, the teeth are adapted for browsing. And there's a lag. In fact, there's this middle zone, which is between those two green lines, which is a five million year, three to five million lag between this dietary shift, which is a behavioral shift to eating grass, and the adaptation of the dentition to eat grass. And if you think about elephants, right, they are slow breeding species.
It makes sense that it would take a long time for them to change aspects of their morphology, like their teeth, because the generation time is slow, the slower generation time, the slower species, you know, the longer it takes to evolve, to adapt. So really, many animal species, not just elephants, are capable of making, Lister argues, you know, they're capable of making these behavioral changes. before the morphological evolutionary change and behavior can precede adaptation. So now if we come back to Asia around 2.6 million years ago we have what's possibly the ancestor of the living elephants, this species called Elephas high pseudogus which is making its way from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent and then you know because elephants came out of Africa, right, there has to be a west to east spread and it would have had to go this way just because that's where elephants evolved.
And so elephants would have had to keep that in mind. So elephants are going from west to east. And as you go from west to east, you know, as we know, like the Asian elephants of India and Sri Lanka were at one point connected via the swan bridge. And. The Sunda Shelf, which was exposed until about 400,000 years ago, allowed these different parts of Southeast Asia to be connected.
So this isolation is the most recent thing that happened about 400,000 years ago. And as you can imagine, whatever environments existed at that time, that's what elephants were exposed to in their dietary habits. You know, it hasn't been that long, 2.6 million years before elephants ever even... existed and evolved right they evolved sometime within the last 2.6 million years that's a relatively short span of time and what you notice is if you just look at the natural color image of this and of course climates change over this time period you know we've had the Pleistocene and now 10,000 years ago it was an ice age and then the ice age ice retreated and what we have consequently is this gradient where on the upper you know On the western side, more on the Indian subcontinent, we have a drier seasonal environment. And as you get towards Southeast Asia, you have a wetter and aseasional environment.
Now that's not to say that that's how it always was. In fact, Sumatra actually had grasslands in it and it had, you know, little dwarf elephants living on it. And so, you know, what you see today isn't necessarily what was always there, that's worth reminding. But the main point is that if you now look at the distribution of elephants and think about their history and their dietary choices, yes, today elephants have an extremely broad ecological niche, but they prefer to eat grass.
And they do really well in places in India and Sri Lanka. We see large groups, right? Like we see large herds in what? In savanna-like environments where they eat grass.
And in the forest of Southeast Asia, we don't see such huge groups. We don't see really, you know, super dense, super large populations of elsons. They're relatively small, cryptic, and even if the forests were intact and not fragmented like they are today, they...
they seem to be in these kind of small groups at lower densities. And all population surveys so far, you know, kind of indicate that. Now, of course, we don't know how it would have been prior to the whole, you know, hunting in the colonial era that pretty much eradicated a lot of elephants from a lot of environments and habitats.
So we don't really know what their social behavior and aggregating behavior would have been like. But that's what we see today. So here we go back to my initial puzzle.
how does a grass loving species thrive in a forest, right? Asian elephants are, I think, usually we might as well have called them Asian Savannah elephants. Asian elephants, I'm going to argue, are basically a grassland, woodland, savannah adapted generalist species that lives in a forest today. And that's their lineage.
They came from a savannah adapted lineage. So when you ask the question, well, how does this graze-adapted species thrive in a forest? You have to wonder, we have to ask, first of all, well, what do we mean by forest, right?
This is a picture from Sri Lanka, and I'm sure you have very similar environments in India, where if you just look at this picture, I mean, is it a forest? Is it a woodland? Is it a grassland? It's a savannah. It's a little snapshot of a little savannah.
But if you go to Borneo, it looks like this. And this is not as dense as some of the rainforests. forests that these elephants are in. This still has some sunlight and open and it's along the edge of a river and the elephants really love this. But you can see grass in the understory.
So what do we mean by forest? Is this a forest? Is that a forest?
And is it sufficient to look at the environments where elephants live today to answer this question? So we looked at the history of these landscapes and I'm just going to call them elephant ecosystems for now. And we in 2023 we published a study looking at the changes in suitable habitat between 1700 and 2015. And you can see from this map the suitable habitats are areas that are yellow and unsuitable habitats are areas in blue.
And we went all the way back to the 800s but the punchline is that the major changes happened between you know the late 1600s early 1700s. and 2015. And you can see the circles are around the hot spots of suitable habitat that disappear between 1700 and 2015. There's an obvious glowing hot spot in central Thailand, there's a glowing hot spot in northern Sri Lanka, and then there's a glowing hot spot in India. Now from that central part of Thailand the elephants are pretty much gone and if you look at their present day ranges they're kind of around the periphery of that hollow area.
And in Sri Lanka, we still have elephants all over. In India, we still have elephants all over. That doesn't mean, though, that the habitat is still there.
The elephants are there, but the habitat isn't. And here you can see it more clearly where we've just binarized it. And we have suitable habitat in yellow and unsuitable habitat in blue. And I'm sorry that it's kind of small on my screen right now, so you can't really see very well.
But the IUC in present day range is in that lower right corner. And you can see how... that fragmented range, right, because elephants are one species, we had to, they would have had to be connected.
They had to be one large interconnected population at one point. They wouldn't have been as fragmented as what we're seeing today. So in our study, we showed that, you know, there were 64% loss of suitable habitats since the 1700s.
And out of that remaining range, that IUCN range in orange, less than 50% of that range is classified as suitable. Whereas in the 1700s, if we drew a buffer of 100 kilometers around the existing range today, everything inside that range and everything within 100 kilometers of that existing range was classified as suitable. All right, so elephant habitat is, you know, has been lost in just the last three centuries. And that fragmentation pattern, that's not an old, you know, pre-plasticine pattern. That's a very recent 300 years ago kind of pattern.
So what is an elephant ecosystem? What kind of ecosystems were they exactly and what are they now? So some of you might be familiar with or if you're not, I encourage you to look at this very interesting work by Earl Ellis and colleagues in his group.
showing that humans have had an impact on landscapes for a very long time. And humans have been occupying various different landscapes and managing them in different ways. And according to this model, a set of models going all the way back thousands of years, 72% of terrestrial ecosystems had already been inhabited by people by the end of the Ice Age.
And this includes 95% of temperate and over 90% of tropical woodlands. So over 90% of tropical woodlands had people in them. And wherever people go, we weren't just sitting there, right? We were doing things and we were having an impact on the landscape in various ways.
Not just like indigenous cultures, that might be the first thing that we think about. But also, you know, shifting agriculture, farming civilizations in Asia had... plenty of farming civilizations that you know that disappeared in the meantime that came and went and so humans have been doing various things in this environment and so here again we have this map that I showed you earlier where you have the yellow suitable habitat and blue unsuitable habitat and now I'm going to show you I'm going to superimpose this is unpublished work that we are now currently working on we looked at okay, what types of anthropogenic influence was there on these habitats? And for that, we use this anthrone dataset that the Ellis group has made publicly available.
And so we just basically overlaid the suitable habitat in these two time periods with those anthrone classifications. And here's what we get. So the suitable habitat in 1700 is everything that's in color. And the areas that are in white are the areas that were already classified as being unsuitable in 1700. And those green shades, those are predominantly populated woodlands and that's in that central Thailand hotspot.
And then in India, that big green area, that's residential woodlands interspersed with inhabited drylands. And then likewise in Borneo, we have kind of these green shades, these are woodlands. And in really In southern Borneo, that's the only place where we see remote woodlands. That doesn't mean that there's no people in there, but those are a wilder class of woodlands than the populated and residential woodlands.
But across Sumatra, again, we have populated woodlands. And then what do we have in 2015? So in 2015, first of all, those gray areas that's all the area that converted to being unsuitable in that time. So area that was previously suitable in 1700 but became unsuitable. And whatever is left, that's what you see in color.
So you can just by eye, you can pretty much see a color match between the areas that are left and the areas that you know were suitable in 1700. The colors are very similar except for this weird exception of Sri Lanka where it looks like we have villages and rain bed villages which are classified as being suitable habitat but of course you might know that elephants pretty much were eradicated from Sri Lanka in that time so Sri Lanka if elephants were there it would be excellent habitat for them but they're not that's what it's telling you and so that's the that's the areas of suitable habitat and what about those areas in grey what did they convert into They converted into villages, into rain-fed villages, irrigated villages, rice villages. So all those purple shades are different kinds of villages. And then you can't see very well in this map, but the pink areas now have masked out the suitable habitat that's left in 2015. So everything else, you can see the mismatch in color.
So that's the change that happened. So the change that happened wasn't that humans went and started cutting down pristine wilderness. changing the forest, occupying forests that was previously unoccupied.
No, the change that happened was the intensification of what we've been doing, like humans settling down pretty much into... into settled permanent agricultural villages, but sometimes with irrigation. That's the change that happened. So coming back to this question of savannas and woodlands, human activity doesn't explain the origins of savannas and woodlands in Asia, but they might have been really important in maintaining that in a certain state.
And there's a number of people who have... advocated for the importance of savannas in Asia and the role that they play, the unique ecology of savanna ecosystems. So woodlands and slash grasslands are naturally occurring biomes in parts of Asia.
And whether or not they're purely anthropogenic is kind of beside the point. The point is that they occur, there are species that are adapted to those environments, and human activity like fire, shifting agriculture, they enhance these grassy areas, they create this kind of complex mosaics, even in the middle of forests like you have in East Asia. And the transition to more permanent settlement and cropping is what drives the habitat loss. And the changes in management alter the remnant forests.
So we have a paradigm now today, post-colonialism, where you have, for example, protected areas where the policy is much more hands-off. And so this kind of activity is not a... allowed in protected areas. So that also changes the dynamics. So just leaving an area and letting it kind of be whatever it is, essentially a tree museum, I call it, that's not the environment that historically occurred, and that's not the environment that these species are adapted for.
So humans, you know, we construct niches. Niche construction by humans also supports other species, you know, whether they want it or not. And, you know, inadvertently, it supports other species.
So how do we do this? You know, we manage water, we create water sources. These are three different reservoirs in Sri Lanka.
So this is a village reservoir. That's a small, small scale reservoir that is now completely inside Uduwala National Park. It was created in the 1970s and 80s. And then you can see this, the diversity of, you know, birds and other wildlife that are now making use of that little tank.
It was a village tank that was then evacuated when the protected area was created. And then the large dam reservoir which was created in the 1960s and 70s, the reservoir after which Udawalle National Park is named, which is also a resource for wildlife now that it's protected inside a protected area. And then we have this ancient reservoir which was built in the third century BC on the far right. And that's a reservoir that is purely rain fed. There's no big dam or river that it's sitting in.
And this reservoir, if it was created in the third century, you can imagine there would have been villages and agriculture and things around it, but now it's in a protected area. So that's water. And then of course, fire.
So these are grasslands in Wayanad district in Caroline, India. And according to my postdoc who has studied, who has worked with indigenous Katunayakan communities, this is what they call, quote unquote, good forest. And good forest is forest that is, you know, has good visibility, has kind of a semi-open canopy.
There may be trees in shade, but there's also this nice grassy understory. And they historically managed it with fire. And they had a very principled way of.
plying fire. They didn't just burn things millennially. And they managed it to have a certain appearance to allow them to move freely, allow them to hunt freely. And it also would have benefited larger herbivores and large, you know, and grazers like not just elephant but also cattle and, you know, bantang.
And obviously there's in Gaur in India and bantang in Southeast Asia. So these are things that people did. So now if we go back to the living species on history and we ask why did you know people want to know why did the the provost go extinct i think um we have a you know an answer to that question which it was mostly driven by climate change and in fact might have to do with over specialization in the face of climate change the species that went extinct when they were sympatric there's another study that shows you know when you had like three species that were living in sympatry the ones that were pretty much obligate browsers and were more committed to a browsing diet versus LFS, which was already quite more, you know, had a dietary generalist, was a dietary generalist at that point.
LFS survived and the others went extinct. So it's not a very large set of observations. That's a sample of one observation, but But it is tempting to think that if you're a large, slow breeding species, you kind of have to be a generalist.
Because if you over-specialize and then the conditions change, you're in a bad situation. But even though they specialize, it's equally interesting to ask, well, given that these other species did go extinct, why did these survive? Why did these three species survive?
And I think that's an equally interesting and perhaps really relevant question today in the face of all not just climate change and anthropogenic disturbance, but also human wildlife conflict, right, as we as our human population increasingly imposes on habitats for wildlife. And I think the answer to that is that, you know, these species survive because they're actually very young species. Elthus maximus is a relatively young species.
and the two African elephant species, they all co-evolved with humans. Humans as hunters, yes, but also humans as ecosystem engineers and modifiers, which the elephants took advantage of. Even with forest elephants, there are indications that forest elephant populations are found in places where human villages have been inside forests. And so elephants and humans have always been in close proximity and elephants have maybe historically even benefited from.
human activity. This is an excerpt from Roberts et al. Perhaps most significantly for us here, however, is the fact that humans have now been found not to be only present in tropical forests over deep time, but also were in some cases modifying them. In the context of the late Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers may have played a role in the extinction of many genera and species of megafauna during the late Pleistocene-holocene resulting in cascading loss of biodiversity, which phenotypic analysis suggested represents two billion years of evolution.
Now, this quote is representative of this perspective that is like, you know, this kind of paradoxical relationship between human presence and sort of beneficial action, but also this implication that hunter-gatherers may have played a role in extinction. So we're always playing these two roles. But I just want you to bear in mind that in the common sort of. Thank you. in in in in our thinking about ourselves as a species it's common to emphasize that second role that destructive role that we have played and really like what we need to do is to embrace and remember our our positive role in ecosystems and step into that role again because if we constantly are thinking of ourselves in this destructive way and that we are really incapable all of of living with nature in a positive way that we flourish along with nature, I think it's really a failure of imagination that prevents us from solving our problems.
So this again is a reflection of that negative thing, you know, sort of painting this negative picture of what humans have done. this negative role that humans have had on wildlife. When we come to the present, that's what's front and center.
That's what we see today, is we have this very destructive effect on ecosystems and wildlife, and even the wildlife that remains even when we have good intentions. Those good intentions are sometimes not the right thing to do. So the second part of it is of the elephant in the Andalucasian is now we have elephants that are living in close proximity with people. And we, for better or for worse, elephants and humans are interacting in other ways. And this is Rambo, who's a bull, and he's standing at the edge of an electric fence at Potawali National Park.
And we have, don't feed the elephant. We have people over time having fed Rambo all kinds of fruits and vegetables and sweet things. And for context, here's the hallway again. This is the national park. You can see the outlines from the satellite imagery and you can see that it's on the edge of elephant range in Sri Lanka down in the south.
And for a very long time, you know, Sri Lanka is leading in human elephant conflict around the world. Last year we lost more than 400 elephants and more than 100 people because of... interactions, these negative interactions, and that's kind of in contrast to this picture you see here from more than 13 years ago, where Rambo is standing behind this fence peacefully with a group of people standing in front of him. and this fence is barely visible in the photograph it's just a couple of thin electric wires and people passing by would feed Rambo and despite signage despite this official prohibition but it is not really enforced and this consequently is obviously it encourages bad behavior on the part of the elephant and bad behavior on the part of people and now Rambo is known to break electric fences after many many years of not doing that for various reasons but there was a prominent study a few years ago that claimed you know that this this type of feeding is not really detrimental it provides supplemental nutrition the strategy is only temporary for males and provides some modest economic benefits for people and encourages you know positive quote-unquote positive human wildlife interaction this was published by Fernando and colleagues which you which was shocking and surprising. And so we have observations of elephants over the same period in the same area as well as observations from India that show that this behavior is obviously not harmless and elephants can not only get killed just by being attracted to this edge and then breaking the fence and doing things on the other side that they're not supposed to, they get hit by cars, they get shot and all kinds of things and then they also get fed things that they shouldn't.
Here's a plastic bag in their dung. They also are prone to becoming diabetic because of all the sweets they're fed. And this is a great opportunity for disease transmission. So we definitely shouldn't be doing it.
And this is not a temporary strategy. So here's the number of years that elephants have been observed at the fence. And a lot of them are seen in just one year, but there are some that are seen across 12, 13 years.
So they keep coming back again and again. And in India, here we have in the Ségur Nature Reserve, Priya Davidar and Jean-Philippe Parvaux have observed the same elephants being fed by tourists. And 11 of the elephants were habitually fed by tourists prior to COVID. And then during COVID, people stopped feeding these elephants.
One of them is Rivaldo here in this picture. And they were able to go back to pretty much their natural diet. Rivaldo in particular was a special case because he was injured and taken into captivity.
for treatment and he was fed during that time, so he was habituated. And then he was taken into captivity again a second time because somebody campaigned, he injured his trunk and somebody campaigned to have him put into captivity permanently and that didn't work, so they released him again. So he was habituated at various times.
But since he's been released he seems to have pretty much gone back to a natural diet and four out of those eleven elephants have been taken. died by 2021 through documented or suspected human action. Rivaldo's still around and the others are still around and as far as we know they don't forage in villages and they are they're all right for now. So this is this is just a table of what happened to those other elephants. This is showing Rivaldo when he was being treated during that that point.
This is him after release. He's still today's pretty much routinely followed and surrounded by forest guards so that people don't get close because he's so habituated and you know they don't want people to start feeding him again so um the one of the challenges with studies like or with with cases like this is that it's very difficult to publish this kind of these kinds of observations because the science scientific journals you know want systematic studies and um and and hypotheses you and so don't tend to want to publish case studies based on one or two or a handful of individuals. So from a practical perspective, and we're talking about management, you know, studies that purport to have systematic approaches and, you know, do some kind of simple statistics that are favored over studies that are observation-based and you can't do simple statistics because they're case studies of one or two individuals.
you know, our decisions and our perspectives are biased in terms of what we can publish and what we can, we're allowed to talk about. But I think these kinds of stories are also really important to talk about and to learn from because, you know, you would never set out to observe something for 12, 13, 20 years. This is all opportunistic. So there's no systematic study that can ever be done that would tell you what happens to these animals.
But it's obviously very important to understand. what those um the consequences can be um and here is just a way of visualizing um problem behaviors and how our actions can either, how we might want to respond to problem behavior. And it's analogous to a biological invasion.
So you have, you know, just like you have an invasive species that might kind of initially be in small numbers and then, you know, you have to try to control it before it becomes, goes out of control. You have a behavior that is initially maybe just exhibited by a small number of individuals. individuals. And it has to be, you might have a critical window as a manager to be able to control that behavior from spreading.
And you really should crack down on that kind of behavior before it spreads in the population and can lead to potentially more conflict or negative impacts on species, on wildlife populations. So that's one of the many challenges of the Anthropocene today. Yes, we were beneficial, but to wildlife in the past.
And when we think about habitat, what suitable habitat looks like and restoration of habitat, we might want to keep that in mind because, you know, it's not just a matter of having trees or grass. It's a matter of understanding what maintains that trees and grass. And then on the flip side, what we think is beneficial sometimes is not.
Like, you know, this well-intentioned people feed elephants for... whatever reason, mostly to get pictures and selfies and things of themselves doing that. But conservationists think that it might be beneficial, but that's not necessarily so. And with that, thank you.
That was a really wonderful session by Dr. Sherman. Thank you, ma'am, for encouraging us. giving us an awareness about the elephants in Anthropocene.
So now we move on to the next part of our session. That's an informal conversation between Dr. Meghna and Dr. Sherman on elephant ecosystems during their evolution and now. Thanks, Rhea. I will come. I welcome Dr. Meghna Agrawala.
She is an ecologist working on forest dynamics and their interaction with human-wildlife conflict. She completed her PhD at Columbia University. Following this, she worked at Earth Institute in partnership with CRFOR Indonesia.
Since then, she has been working as an assistant professor at Ashoka University. She is currently working on human-elephant conflict across India. I welcome you, ma'am.
Thanks, Rhea. So, Sherman, that was a great talk. I'll just introduce myself.
I'm mainly a forest ecologist. And the question that I'm interested in is how changing forest composition may be influencing human-wildlife conflict. So, Sherman, one thing that struck me in your talk was that when you showed in the 1700s, when you showed where the elephants could be, all of those open woodlands or, you know, human-habited landscapes, they were all areas that...
So basically what happens with savannah is there's two ways of having grasslands. One is if your precipitation is too low, in which case you could have grasslands. And the second is your precipitation is above a certain threshold, but then it's only disturbance that's maintaining the savannah.
And what was striking about your map was that all the areas where the precipitation is too low, Those areas were never suitable elephant habitat and all the suitable elephant habitat were those areas with the precipitations above the threshold and its disturbance maintaining the savannah in all of those regions. So it really does seem in this case that perhaps disturbance, whether in the form of fire or in the form of herbivory, was what created the landscape that was appropriate for elephants in the 1700s. Yeah, so this question of what created the landscape versus what maintains it, you know, and I think from the, you know, from the studies that were in my slide, right, like the argument is that the creation of the savannas predates humans. And so whatever those climatic conditions were, whatever the periphery, right, whatever it was, the antecedent conditions, you know, the savannas originated prior to the major activity by humans.
And And now I don't know actually the human history on the continent that well. So I think this would call for also understanding from an anthropological perspective, right? What is the human presence and human settlements and all of that? And then again, from a paleontological perspective, what were the species that were there? But just from a very high level perspective, we can just see like, I mean, when I was in East Africa, and I was just looking at the...
you know, the different suites of the guilds of species that you find, right? Like you have the elephants and you have the ostriches and you have whatnot. There are lots of species that are unique to Africa. But if I look at, you know, there's crossovers. So there's Indian rollers, and then there's African rollers, right?
And then you have other species where you see there are these kind of sister species. Of course, we have the lions, which are now not that widespread, but you know, once upon a time they were, right? And we have the rhinoceros.
So you have these species that are more grass slash grassland slash woodland adapted savannah woodland type adapted species and so on the indian subcontinent side which includes also sri lanka and on the african side so if you if you look at not just the plants right we're maybe we're thinking about the plants and we're thinking too much about plants if you look at also the rest of the eat you know the the complete community it's a mirror image right you Africa, Asia, you have African savannas and Asian savannas and the whole thing is one picture, right? And we have to take all that together and I'm tempted to see like I'm wondering if anyone has really done that if you were to create an entire, you know, list and then if we go back in time historically, we know there were hippopotamus right and you told me this Meghna and you know and other species so that really is the complete picture. I think when we look at just one thing we tend to maybe it's a little bit too narrow.
and we look at just grass or just fire or just a particular woodland type. Though we look at the whole, it's really hard to escape the conclusion that these were just mirror images of their related sister taxa that then diversified and branched off in other directions. And just to add to that, even in the forest elephants that we see in India, not in Southeast Asia as much.
But like, you know, when we think of Western Ghats, we think of it as evergreen. But all the elephants are also ranging on the leewards and the Western Ghats, which is again dry deserts, woodlands. So there's still, it's very much like, I can't think of any elephant whose habitat, any elephant range whose habitat is not including the woodland habitat. Right, right. And even woodland habitat that is more relatively recently modified, like thorns grow, right?
You know, that might... you know, in some places that might be originally what it was, but in other cases it's actually, it is a degraded habitat because like for example in southern Sri Lanka we have introduced acacia trees and these were part of the government quote-unquote forestation, you know, forest scheme, afforestation scheme, after the decision of the forest that was there were cut down. And so What if you look out now, it looks like, you know, this acacia, it looks like parts of Kenya, like this, you know, elephants, and then there's grass underneath and there's acacia thorn. But the elephants are fine there.
Like they, you know, they love this environment. They do fine in it. And, you know, which is not to say that that's better or worse, but just that, you know, what do elephants need?
Well, they can do well in lots of different types of environments. That's one of them. And the original deciduous forests, that's what they had before.
And those deciduous forests would have had grasses, you know. because people were doing shifting agriculture and it was also a seasonal environment and seasonally very dry environment. What we still see in Sri Lanka is that the elephants also are not, they don't really occur in a forest that is now protected and is completely undisturbed and has big trees and more of a closed canopy.
They just don't occur there as much. So even, yeah, Sukhar is going to come later, but he's also finding something similar. So when the canopy is too closed and there's no sunlight filtering in, then it becomes really difficult for large mega herbivores like elephants to be able to stay there.
Right, right. And we have to keep in mind that it's, you know, we are talking about elephants, but there's a lot of other species, right? Like whether it's the cattle, whether it's, you know, deer and there are these other things that we are maybe not.
focused on as much because they're not as conflict prone as elephants and so this becomes really relevant because if we don't have the right kind of habitat for elephants and they're forced to go outside of that habitat which they will because they anyway have to disperse right well then then you're setting up the the state you're setting the stage for increased contact with people and with potential conflicts and with going into agriculture and all of that so it's really important that whatever area that we designated for elephants actually be appropriate for elephants So the second thing I thought was really interesting was when you were talking about those conflict animals that were being fed by humans, how when they were no longer given food, they returned to just using the forest. So do you think you could tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, so in the case of the... I guess there's this idea out there that many people are testing that perhaps elephants are coming out to agricultural fields because it's more attractive because of nutrient levels rather than being pushed out because there isn't enough nutrition in the forest. So the fact that they were able to go back says something about the elephants.
So that's what I was wondering about your thoughts on this. Oh, great question. Yeah, so I see. Yeah, so I mean, this is a, so this area I have not personally been, so that story is from, like I said, JP and Priya in the Sigura Nature Reserve, which is nestled in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. And it seems like there at least, I mean, from what I understand, that is a very complex mosaic kind of landscape where you do have a lot of agriculture people and whatnot.
But when the COVID shutdown happened, it it caused tourism and these are very specifically elephants that were fed by tourists right and so whether or not they did any crop raiding you know we don't know that so it's just specifically with respect to being fed by tourists you know and then being in the village and things it seems like that has stopped and since the since the pandemic happened and they kind of had to go back to foraging and now the pandemic is over and I think authorities are still really trying to enforce that so they shared with me an article from a newspaper recently that some tourist lodge had, you know, some people had been caught trying to again feed elephants and had actually been arrested and so very severe punishment for doing this. So that indicates that yes, they're capable of going back and at least in that area there must be natural forage, but whether they do other things like going to croplands, that we don't know, right? So I heard that WWF had radio collared some five elephants there that had been conflict elephants. So basically they had been caught and because they were conflict, they were raiding a lot. And after they were collared, when they were released from the collaring data, it seems that they stuck to the forest.
So again, over there also you're seeing an example of them just sticking to the forest. Maybe it was unfamiliar or I don't know why, but be interesting to look at. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, and there's also... you know, these other studies that, some of them are, you know, these genetic studies, again, that show that despite the fact that elephants can disperse over long distances, they don't necessarily, and Priya and JP are also observing that there are males, you know, you would expect them to disperse, but there are males that are still sticking around their family groups. I mean, that's, to me, bizarre, like really unheard of with elephants in particular.
I don't know how much that has to do with fragmentation and how much that has to do with other things. So one more thing I had is given that you gave us such a hopeful view of the future about human elephant interactions, given how the environment has changed, where do you see elephant human interactions going in the future? Thank you.
So this is why my lab has kind of like done this. pivot to a certain extent where we're now no longer just focused on elephants and we are also equally, I would say, 50-50 focused on humans and what people do. Because it is impossible to turn the clock back, right?
So we can never go back in time. So we always have to go forwards. And the lesson here is that... It's not that we're trying to reset these ecosystems into some state in the past, and we can't, because human population density is a lot higher, villages are there, you know, like, that's what's there.
But at the same time, I think it's really important to paraphrase Maya Angelou, I always say, like, you know, you can't understand where you're going if you don't understand where you've been. And so in managing these ecosystems, there is oftentimes... in many places, a very colonial mindset with which those areas were created and managed, and a lot of social and justice issues around those areas.
And going forward, I think recognizing that the human species is not just purely an evil destructive force, but that we can be a beneficial force. So who are those? What can we learn from our history?
And what can you learn about what an actual healthy ecosystem looks like from people who may have a very strong and close shared relationship with those ecosystems, I think is important. Indigenous communities especially, which I think in... South Asian cultures have not been provided much, like, many rights and their perspectives have been devalued a lot and not much very different from the West, where Indigenous perspectives are now kind of coming up and more honored. And just recognizing that, well, okay, I think first thing is to really understand what the history was and what we learned from it. And then make policy decisions based on that understanding, then just kind of, you know, sticking with this playbook that's 300 years old from the colonial era in terms of what, you know, what forests represent, what wildlife should or shouldn't do and where they belong and where people belong.
That's going to, and it's not going to be easy, that's going to raise some very difficult questions. And the most difficult question is, you know, it is still the case that if we didn't have protected areas, right, I'm not saying we should get rid of them. Because if we didn't have protected areas, all those areas that were purple, like it would be completely purple, right? Like we wouldn't have these remnant habitats at all. And so the difficult question is, you know, these habitats are fragmented.
I think the future means linking up, trying to link up those habitats and really close, really carefully thinking about what human activity is appropriate along. along those inside around those those habitats both for the sake of elephants but also for the sake of people because you know we can't have 400 people in india getting killed by elephants right that's just not acceptable so the it's it's from a humanistic standpoint as well as from a wildlife standpoint a difficult follow-up question sherman is that people in various paths are their aspirations have changed and they're choosing that they don't want to coexist you with elephants like they're lobbying governments against elephants etc etc so how do we resolve that because that's sort of a problem yeah well i think that is going to take a lot of um just action and activism and working with people on the ground right like that's where you know we different people have different roles to play so i from the 60 000 foot view like can't influence that dynamic and can't talk the people on the ground but um organizations that are based in those locations can hopefully take the kinds of work that we're doing and these perspectives and translate them into you know things into dialogue into policy into educational material into whatever has to happen on the ground and when i say education i'm i really don't like you know this kind of passive education where you just say oh we're gonna do an awareness campaign we're gonna do an awareness like raising awareness like Like, no, I think it has to be much more integrated with like, you know, with the community, what identifying, you know, there's lots of human wildlife conflict literature on this, you know, really identifying what it is that's going on in a particular location, what it is that people have a grievance against, who is stoking those, you know, viewpoints, if that's, if that's happening, right, what politics is going on. And for that, you really have to be embedded there.
And you have to know what's happening. And you can't speak from 30,000, you know, 60,000 feet. Okay, thanks. That's all. I think that's all in interest of time.
Perhaps we can move on to the question answer session. Rhea, all yours. Thanks, Sherman. Thanks, Meghna.
Thank you, Meghna ma'am. Thank you, Sherman ma'am. That was a really interesting conversation. Now we move on to the last part of our today's evening. It's a question answer session.
which is headed by Shikhar. So Shikhar is a nature and wildlife enthusiast with broad research interests, including ecology and conservation biology and natural resource management. He holds a master's degree in environmental management and bachelor's in zoology honors. Currently, he is a third year PhD student at the Department of Biology at Ashoka University.
His research focuses on understanding various aspects of human-elephant conflict in Angle Forest Circle, Odisha. Additionally, his interests extend to understanding the behavioral ecology and acoustics of elephants, as well as social dimensions of conflict and coexistence. Shikhar, I give the stage to you to host the Q&A session. Thank you so much for the introduction, Riya, and thank you, Sherman and Meghna, for the great talk and conversation. So I will start the quick Q&A session with a couple of questions that I have had and meanwhile I would request everyone to type their questions in the chat box and I will convey it to Dr. Sherman, so Dr. Sherman, one thing that I found very interesting was that you talked about how Asian elephants have evolved to have a grass dominant diet, although they are mixed feeders, but they have like a grass dominant diet.
But at least in my study area, I've seen that those grass patches are few and far between. It's mostly like a woodland sort of an ecosystem, which is like, like sort of like on the edge or mosaic with all the agricultural land. So what does that entail if elephants are living in that sort of an ecosystem where they have to be like mixed browsers and have feed on grass only when the grass is available?
So what does that entail for the physiology of the elephants in the longer run and does that also result in them doing more crop reproduction because they want to like get hold of certain nutrients that they would not normally get with the browse that they're eating? Possibly, because I can't remember where I've read this or heard this, but for grass and having good green grass, fresh grass can be important for milk production, for example. It can be important for being in good physiological health to reproduce and being in good body condition.
So if that grass is not available, then of course they can survive on the browse and the dry, you know, other things. And I don't know to what extent, you know, they need to have a balance of. those two things because again you know they can do perfectly well it's just that they may not be at such high densities right and so they may make again social structure kind of adjustments by not being in such large groups they may be in smaller groups where there's less competition for those little patches of grass and they may you know they may have to increase how the distance that they walk around the range right whereas you know if there's much more rich grass or a richer source of food, they can be in both larger groups and be in a smaller area and cover less ground.
So all of that has consequences for the energy expenditure and that can downstream affect things like birth intervals, how good the condition is of the mother, cat's survival. And if there is an opportunity then where you see a really concentrated crop or something that's a good resource, that could motivate wanting to feed on that. Now, males and females, though, females are more risk-averse than males. And so we observe in India and Sri Lanka, a lot of the time it's males that are involved in the crop foraging and less so the females, which is not to say the females don't do it at all, but it's less so the females.
And if the studies from Africa by Patrick Chiu, for example, make a convincing argument that this is part of this high risk, high gain strategy for males, where they want to bulk up and they want to become competitively, you know, as quickly as possible, they want to get as big as possible. And that also is the case for Rambo. So Rambo was, you know, sitting there bulking up and, and then he hit what we think is around his 40s.
And then he started going after females. So he was sitting around the fence, even in his must, even during his must, and not really like for the first 20 years, right, we not really moving from that fence. And then all of a sudden, now he hits his reproductive. peak and he's going around with females and he's going inside the park and he's also starting to eat sugarcane so so so that life history stage change seems to be an important trigger so for females if there is if there is forest and if there is cover and if there is still grass they may not choose to risk it with their with their calves and with their young and to be out in the crop land so it's not just the nutrition but it's the amount of risk that you have to undertake to be able to benefit from that nutrition.
So it's this classic, you know, landscape of fear, predator versus resource kind of trade-off, predator security versus resource scheme. We do see in Southeast Asia that females, we hear reports that females are cooperating and they are doing that. So, you know, why that variation, I think is an interesting question and you would have to piece apart the different variables in each location to see, you know, what is the quality of the...
available forage there versus what is the risk that people you know sometimes people are at very low densities in southeast asia and thailand like it's just very small villages very small you know number of people maybe compared to the crop lands and large agricultural crops right like palm oil or something like you know these huge plantations well the risk there is very low right as opposed to in india and sri lanka where you have very heavily defended small mosaic crop small holder you know where the risk is much higher if you're a female Also, a follow-up to this question, you talked about how males being more involved in crop depredation and conflict in general. So like there are reports, at least from my study area, that when there are conflict related incidents happen, so there is a skewness in the mortality of males versus females. So males or makhnas get more involved in conflict and the deaths happen like more of males and females. So what does that entail for the overall population?
Because there will be then skewness in like a gender or sex ratio that population has to maintain. Yeah, I mean, if there is a bias mortality, then that often happens. of course can have a you know an impact on the the gene pool i mean with elephants generally like overall like males versus female male bias mortality that doesn't you know that doesn't have as much of an effect because of the polygyny and everything like that but in places where you have extreme sex ratios skew that can be a problem i'm not so worried about like you know tuskers versus non-tuskers like that's you know the tusks are nice but you have to lose them then you lose them and you know sri lanka is mostly you know tuskless males and and they're like in terms of like the population that doesn't have much of an effect.
I mean, although it's nice to have tuskers in the population. But yeah, but if there's biased mortality, it's more of a concern when you have like, for example, again, the Rambo case, or like males that are going in, you know, crop foraging, if there are certain personality types, you know, like, if there's differential mortality of certain character traits and personality types, you know, there are these innovative, you know, kind of individuals who are also pretty gentle and pretty, you know, they're fed and because they're very docile with people. And so people kind of like walk up to them.
And so that's a personality trait. And if those individuals are differentially being killed for whatever reason, because they are taking risks that they shouldn't do things back and have also a consequence that we might not appreciate as much as, you know, tusks versus tusks. There are also some questions in the chat, Chikur, that you might want to get to there. Yeah, yeah.
I will now get to the questions in the chat box. So this question is from Vadhiraj Deshpande. So you talked about differences in molars depending on diet and grass respectively.
Can you like talk a little bit about difference if any in the gastrointestinal tract of the elephants while they were evolving? Oh okay that's a great question and I have to say I actually don't know much about that because for one thing you know that kind of thing doesn't fossilize very well. We don't know what their digestive system would have looked like.
But just from, if I were just to speculate based on what we know today, I'm sure they had vastly different microbiomes because, you know, the kinds of gut microflora that you would need to process one type of diet is probably very different than what you would need from the other. And then I don't know if there would have been differences in length of the gastrointestinal tract, for example. You know, we do know that elephants are more likely.
horses and that they have relatively simple guts, they don't do the fermentation process that cattle and things do. So I would speculate that there would be, but I actually don't know a whole lot about what the actual differences would have been. There's another question by Seema. She asks, what is the specific loss of biodiversity due to diminishing number of elephants? So loss of biodiversity due to loss of elephants, I think I wouldn't draw a direct causal arrow there, but it's more that, you know, elephants themselves, like, yes, they are ecosystem engineers.
So they are spreading seeds. They're doing all kinds of things that, you know, are modifying these micro habitats and modifying habitats over various space, spatial scales. But also like, you know, environments that support elephants also support other species.
And so they can. represent different kinds of ecosystems. So in our study, you know, what we call elephant ecosystems, that's a broad array of, you know, all these, everything from these forested environments, you know, including, you know, Southeast Asia to the more drier woodland type of environments. And so losing elephants themselves, for example, through hunting, while that environment is still there, while the other species, you know, they might still be intact. So like, if you just remove elephants over a long period of time, you might see change because elephants are not.
dispersing certain seeds and so they're not propagating certain grasses or trees or what have you. But in the immediate term, you know, that's not a consequence. But if you are losing elephants because the habitat is just disappearing, right, and so that's it.
So if elephants are serving as a sort of indicator for whether that habitat is there or not, well then of course you're losing all the other species that live in that habitat too. Another question by Parasmita is that do you have any opinions regarding the religious belief that persist in India regarding elephants and if it's encouragingly positive or negative with respect to the human elephant interactions? So that's a very interesting question.
And some people have looked at this in Southern India, Takekura's paper, for example, looking at different kinds of cultural views towards elephants. And it hasn't been studied as much, but we've also looked at it in Sri Lanka a little bit, where we again, we have this Buddhist outlook. And so we have Hinduism and Buddhism that have relationships with elephants in various ways. And it's interesting in that I think people kind of tend to, especially in the West, tend to maybe oversimplify that.
And there's this sense that people view elephants as sacred because of their associations with religion. And what we see, at least in Sri Lanka, is not that people view elephants as such as sacred. They might view temple elephants as being sacred, or they might think that elephants are important for their culture, like for the professions, for the this, for the that.
But they don't necessarily think wild elephants are sacred. And so that's an oversimplification. how people view elephants. And I think above everything else, like if you have that sort of like symbolic value of elephants versus the very real risk that they present to lifestyle, livelihood, you know, safety and well-being, of course people prioritize that. And so it's very conceivable that even though they might have a sort of general, you know, like value of elephants, whether it's in the spiritual domain or some other way.
And that sort of like sets a predisposition to have, like to be more tolerant and have a more positive perspective. If their immediate lives and livelihoods are impacted and cause stress, worry, harm, anxiety, economic loss, then that can very easily change. And we see even that in Bhutan, for example, where Bhutan is kind of, you know, very renowned for its sort of...
past Pacific cultures, you know, it's culture of very friendly, nice people, and also having a lot of forest cover and being very environmentally sound. But when you see areas with conflict, people's opinions change very quickly. And as conflict intensifies, people's opinions change dramatically very quickly.
And so I don't think that, yeah, I don't think that necessarily can just be counted on as a thing to get us out of trouble. On a similar note, there is another question by Divya. India and Sri Lanka, unfortunately, house a lot of elephants in the temples.
We also have a lot of rescued elephants. So how would you best recommend rescued elephants be treated? Ideally, should they be introduced back into the wild or they be kept in the rescue centers or something like that? Yeah, so this is outside of my immediate experience, so I can't speak to it without knowing specifics of those rescued elephants. To make a general statement, I think would be risky because they might come from all kinds of backgrounds, depending on how long they were in captivity, how they were treated.
But in general, elephants have spent a long time in human care or maybe came into it as babies. They probably wouldn't really have the skills that they need to be able to be released into the wild. They need to know how to forage.
They need to know what to eat, where to go, and all the things that we would have to learn. as a human if you were to drop a person into a forest and say okay go survive that wouldn't work so the rescued elephants that are rehabilitated however in these rescue centers there are several as one couple and there's one in Sri Lanka and a couple in India where you have juveniles that are rescued specifically with the intention of releasing them into the wild and they're given the training and they're given what they need to know to survive those ideally you know the younger they are that you get them and that you can rehabilitate them and send them back, I think yes they should be sent back. But when you get adults and they're older and they can't really fend for themselves, certainly then they need to be in more of a sanctuary situation. Meghna also has a question.
So Malhi has a paper where he says disturbance due to mega herbivores, which have declined a lot since the Holocene, was replaced by disturbance due to fires. Perhaps elephants were the disturbance creating... savannas in areas before humans started burning forests.
So your thoughts on that? Yeah, very interesting proposition. So, you know, and I mean, again, like I don't have the paleontological knowledge to say, you know, one way or the other what I think about that hypothesis.
I think it's a really interesting hypothesis. And I think it's perfectly, you know, it's perfectly plausible, given that, you know, maybe these negative... So one thing about the dispersal, is that, you know, remember that time frame of humans versus chimpanzees, the divergence, that's like about 6 million years, 5 to 7 million years.
And Phobosidians made it out of Africa 20 million years ago. So that's long before humans were humans, right? So elephants were on these landscapes, they were doing their thing. long before people were modifying the landscapes in any kind of substantial way. So they had to be, they had to have a major influence on the landscape.
And then later on, come fire, well, you know, that has to do with also climate change, right? Were there environments that were getting more dry and getting to be more grass-dominated as a result of climate change that would have enabled fires to take place and even naturally set lightning fires? to be more of a thing than, say, more heavily forested environments.
Again, you know, that would have all been going on, I would probably say, prior to the arrival of humans. And so the role of fire, I think now it becomes interesting as we get closer to the present, right? Like how much of that fire dynamic would have been anthropogenically driven and would have really just been maintaining something that previously was going on. And...
Yeah, I think it's an interesting question that still needs a lot of exploration. One last question from Avijan is that can Maljurians, that is a male herd navigating, are they navigating herds into new foraging landscapes? I'm sorry, I missed it. What are the herds navigating? If I'm not wrong, and correct me if I'm wrong, this question I guess is about Are male herds navigating like mixed herds or female herds into new foraging landscapes?
I see. So male groups, so we don't know how long lived those male groups are. So there are those studies from again from southern India, Srinivasan and other that you know that Srinivasa, sorry, that males are associating in these male groups to these more endogenically.
modified landscapes, and we see that also in Sri Lanka, whether they actually stick together for a long period of time, that we don't know. And whether they are, you know, kind of moving together into new landscapes, that also we don't know. I would, you know, I would just anecdotally from these observations in China, right, with this elephant group that was going over this huge distance during the during COVID, there were both of that group.
There were males in that group, which was kind of surprising, right? You have the females and males, this mixed group kind of choosing to go this long distance together. So I think there's a lot to be still a lot to be learned about male sociality.
And that is a lot of what we know is based on females. But males may be doing different things in different parts and we just don't know. So that was all of the questions.
Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Dr. Sherman. Thank you, Shakur, for hosting a wonderful Q&A session.
So I thank all the speakers for this intellectual evening and opening up on the world of elephants. Thank you for helping us understand on their roles on ecosystem and humans and how we should coexist together to have a better and a bright future. I also thank all the participants for listening to us and I hope that your curiosity to dive deep into the world of elephants have increased and I hope that we all contribute even minuscule towards the conservation of ecosystem moving forward. Thank you everyone for this wonderful session and joining us. Thank you and I want to thank everybody who joined so late in the evening for you.
I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Shahbaz.
Thanks everybody. all right take care