By University of Oxford A ground-breaking, nine-year study has revealed that elephants approaching small-scale farms in Kenya avoid beehive fences housing live honey bees up to 86% of the time during peak crop seasons, helping to reduce human-elephant conflict for...
By Nicola Davis, The Guardian While humans are split between right-handers and left-handers, elephants have a preference for which side of their trunk they use. Now scientists have discovered it is possible to determine an elephant’s “trunkedness” by looking at its...
By Naidoo et al - Journal of Applied Ecology Abstract Landscape connectivity operates at a variety of scales, depending on the geography of the area in question and the focal species or ecological process under consideration. Most connectivity studies, however, are...
By Lauren Quinn, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Phys.org Elephant conservation is a major priority in southern Africa, but habitat loss and urbanization mean the far-ranging pachyderms are...
By Frank Krell, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Phys.org How many dung beetles are there in East Africa? That question inspired a research project more than 20 years ago when Frank Krell was a research entomologist with the Natural History Museum London....
By Colorado State University Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among nonhuman animals, according to a new study. Researchers used machine learning to confirm that elephant calls contained a name-like component identifying...
By University of Bristol, Phys.org A new way of quickly distinguishing between illegal elephant ivory and legal mammoth tusk ivory could prove critical to fighting the illegal ivory trade. A laser-based approach developed by scientists at the Universities of Bristol...
A review of elephant aerial surveys, 2010 - 2022 By Scott Schlossberg1 & Michael Chase1* - Elephants Without BordersExecutive Summary In 2022, an aerial survey for African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) was conducted over the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier...
By Daegan Miller, University of Massachusetts Amherst A collaborative team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which runs the world’s largest field conservation program, has conducted first-of-its...
By Adam Cruise Abstract Trophy hunting is a controversial topic. On the one hand, the idea that a handful of the wealthy elite pays top dollar to shoot iconic and rare animals for ‘sport’ draws the ire of a far greater number of sensible (and sensitive) humans. On the...