After Poaching Deaths, Elephants Rearrange FamiliesBy Sindya N. Bhanoo via The New York TimesPoach
After Poaching Deaths, Elephants Rearrange Families By Sindya N. Bhanoo via The New York TimesPoachers target older elephants for ivory because their tusks are larger. Elephants live in groups led by older females, and their loss may drastically affect the social structures of these communities.Yet elephant societies managed to survive the loss of their matriarchs, a new study has found.“We were expecting some sort of social collapse, especially knowing how important matriarchs are to a society,” said Shifra Goldenberg, a wildlife ecologist doctoral candidate at Colorado State University and an author of the new report, which was published in Current Biology.Instead, the researchers found that after the loss of a matriarch, female offspring often stepped in and leveraged their mother’s contacts to rebuild social networks. (The study did not track adult males.)Typically, elephants live in core, bond and clan groups. Core groups comprise close relatives, and bond and clan groups include more distant ones.After poaching incidents, the researchers watched as different core groups fused. “Families that dissolve because of poaching group up,” Ms. Goldenberg said. “Sometimes, it is genetically based, but we also saw unrelated groupings.”The researchers studied the behavior of adult female elephants in northern Kenya’s Samburu and Buffalo Springs national reserves over a 16-year period starting in 1997. A major drought in 2009 also affected the population. -- source link
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