Loss of Matriarchs Means the End of Elephant Memory
It is now estimated that over 30,000 African elephants are being butchered annually for an ivory market catering to Asia’s nouveau riches, a rate of elimination that if unchecked will foreseeably result in their extinction in the wild. For the first time, the number of elephant and rhino carcasses attributed to poaching exceeds the number reportedly dying from natural causes; truly a horrifying vision for imperiled wildlife and the traditional peoples, local governments, and small businesses depending upon them for a living.
Elephants live in highly ordered, long-term societies, extended family clans led by older females imbued with hereditary wisdom, and poaching destroys not only the targeted adults but also the dependent and terrorized juvenile orphans left behind. The annihilation of the leading matriarchs in whose ancient minds are stored geographic details and survival tactics reaching back generations endangers the entire group, which deprived of leadership often breaks down completely. The situation for these animals is decidedly grim: elephants today face a changed landscape of escalating heat and drought, unrelenting poaching, and shrinking habitat, and without the accumulated wisdom of their elders, the traumatized survivors of the ivory syndicates are increasingly isolated and imperiled.
Female elders are the leaders in elephant society, choosing when and where to migrate and what areas to avoid. Given the enormous dietary needs of so great an animal in a harsh and unforgiving landscape, elephants must carefully gauge their every expenditure of energy and plan ahead for potentially calamitous problems. Biologists have determined that elephant families in which the matriarchs have been removed stand a much lower chance of surviving natural enemies such as predators and starvation, as well as human dangers like poachers or defended farmland. The matriarchs are believed to remember being taught these lessons in their youth, lessons learned gradually over time from female relatives that in turn learned from their own mothers reaching back to the distant past. Kill off the elders and their stores of wisdom are lost forever, rupturing the hereditary chain of experiential learning and leaving the inexperienced inheritors bereft of crucial knowledge needed to survive.
Elephant groups deprived of guidance from older females are typically composed of younger, nonrelated females with few calves – those infants that were under the age of two when they saw their mothers killed have a zero percent survival rate. Socially incohesive and subject to continued stress that lowers reproductive success, leaderless elephant societies often wander unknowingly into dangerous interactions with people and are themselves poached, either for their nominal tusks or simply in defense of a village’s crops.
Such is the longevity of elephant social groups, not to mention their celebrated memories, that recent studies in Tanzania’s Mikumi National Park have demonstrated that resident elephants have yet to recover from the last great poaching rampage of 1979-1987, when Africa’s elephant numbers plunged from 1.3 million to 600,000 individuals. Today only half the number of those survivors still roams the continent, with their numbers falling daily.
The African elephant is the nonpareil example of terrestrial animal, a fundament of the continent where man took his first steps. In the words of Peter Matthiessen, “There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.” If we are to allow such an elemental being to be annihilated for something so paltry as carven knick-knacks, what can that say about our own species and its place on this earth?
Elephants live in highly ordered, long-term societies, extended family clans led by older females imbued with hereditary wisdom, and poaching destroys not only the targeted adults but also the dependent and terrorized juvenile orphans left behind. The annihilation of the leading matriarchs in whose ancient minds are stored geographic details and survival tactics reaching back generations endangers the entire group, which deprived of leadership often breaks down completely. The situation for these animals is decidedly grim: elephants today face a changed landscape of escalating heat and drought, unrelenting poaching, and shrinking habitat, and without the accumulated wisdom of their elders, the traumatized survivors of the ivory syndicates are increasingly isolated and imperiled.
Female elders are the leaders in elephant society, choosing when and where to migrate and what areas to avoid. Given the enormous dietary needs of so great an animal in a harsh and unforgiving landscape, elephants must carefully gauge their every expenditure of energy and plan ahead for potentially calamitous problems. Biologists have determined that elephant families in which the matriarchs have been removed stand a much lower chance of surviving natural enemies such as predators and starvation, as well as human dangers like poachers or defended farmland. The matriarchs are believed to remember being taught these lessons in their youth, lessons learned gradually over time from female relatives that in turn learned from their own mothers reaching back to the distant past. Kill off the elders and their stores of wisdom are lost forever, rupturing the hereditary chain of experiential learning and leaving the inexperienced inheritors bereft of crucial knowledge needed to survive.
Elephant groups deprived of guidance from older females are typically composed of younger, nonrelated females with few calves – those infants that were under the age of two when they saw their mothers killed have a zero percent survival rate. Socially incohesive and subject to continued stress that lowers reproductive success, leaderless elephant societies often wander unknowingly into dangerous interactions with people and are themselves poached, either for their nominal tusks or simply in defense of a village’s crops.
Such is the longevity of elephant social groups, not to mention their celebrated memories, that recent studies in Tanzania’s Mikumi National Park have demonstrated that resident elephants have yet to recover from the last great poaching rampage of 1979-1987, when Africa’s elephant numbers plunged from 1.3 million to 600,000 individuals. Today only half the number of those survivors still roams the continent, with their numbers falling daily.
The African elephant is the nonpareil example of terrestrial animal, a fundament of the continent where man took his first steps. In the words of Peter Matthiessen, “There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.” If we are to allow such an elemental being to be annihilated for something so paltry as carven knick-knacks, what can that say about our own species and its place on this earth?
