The region was once considered the kingdom of the forest elephants – the large populations of pachyderms gave the Ivory Coast its name. But now the symbolic animals are threatened to disappear completely from the West African country, warn researchers. Of the once thousands of animals, only about 225 specimens remain, which also live in isolated groups. As in other regions of Africa, the cause of the decline in elephants is the lack of protection of the nature reserves, the study shows. In the Ivory Coast, more and more cocoa plantations are spreading in the protected areas.
During the colonial period, the country in West Africa with its enormous elephant populations was a rich source of “white gold” – this is how the name Ivory Coast came about. The current state “Republic of Côte d’Ivoire” also has an elephant in its coat of arms. Typical of the country were the forest elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis), which lived in the once huge forest areas of the country. The range of this subspecies of the African elephant includes the tropical rainforests of the central and western parts of Africa.
By hunting to meet the demand for ivory, the numbers of forest elephants in Ivory Coast declined early on. But as the researchers led by Jean-Louis Kouakou from the Félix-Houphouet-Boigny University in Abidjan report, the catastrophic collapse of recent times was probably only caused by the severe loss of the forest elephant’s habitat. It is estimated that at the beginning of the 20th century there were sixteen million hectares of forest in Ivory Coast, today there are only four million hectares and the deforestation continues.
habitat loss
The former natural areas are mainly transformed into cocoa plantations and this process does not stop at the protected areas, which apparently mostly only exist on paper. As the researchers report, earlier studies already suggested that there are only a few remaining forest elephant populations in some of the reserves. In order to obtain more up-to-date information, they have now set out in search of traces of the pachyderms in 25 protected areas where elephants once lived at least once. To this end, the authors analyzed manure finds, records of human-elephant conflicts, media reports and survey data from 2011 to 2017. They also recorded developments in the forest stock in the protected areas.
It turned out that only in four of the 25 protected areas examined could they still detect forest elephants and these are small populations, as the evidence shows. According to the scientists, it is ultimately becoming apparent that the total population of forest elephants in Ivory Coast has collapsed by around 85 percent in the last few decades. Presumably there are only about 225 copies left.
Before the end due to lack of protection
“The vast majority of the Ivory Coast’s protected areas have lost all of their elephant populations as a result of a lack of action,” the researchers write. Because, as they further report, there were apparently disastrous developments: Despite the formal protection status, large parts of the areas were turned into farms and human settlements. Conversely, it can be seen that reserves with a higher level of protection were also more likely to still house elephants. Their occurrence within the protected areas was clearly determined by human influence: by the size of the population, the impairment of the habitat and the expansion of the cocoa plantations.
“For various reasons, the survivability of the remaining populations now appears questionable,” the researchers write. An important problem is the small size of the groups and their isolation due to the fragmentation of the forests. “Drastic conservation measures are required to protect the remaining forest elephant populations, including law enforcement to protect their remaining habitat and anti-poaching measures,” say the scientists.
Source: PLOS. Articles: PLOS ONE, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0232993