In what may aid the conservationists to protect wild elephants in the long run, Karnataka researchers have come out with a new method to identify individual male elephants in the wild.
The method can help forest officials identify individual male elephants based on the shape and size of their tusks, ears, and tail features. This in turn can be used to monitor the tuskers’ survival rates and movement.
“The method is fairly reliable. It shows out of every 143 elephants, only two may have similar features,” Varun Goswami, one of the lead researchers working at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Bangalore told Deccan Herald.
Besides WCS, Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore and Karnataka state forest department officials were involved in perfecting the technique, details of which were recently published in the journal Animal Conservation.
Last year for more than five months, the researchers photographed 991 wild elephants in Bandipur-Nagarahole reserves. They took 2,400 photographs of individual elephants besides sampling game roads and waterholes.
The focus was more on the male elephants because unlike African elephants where both males and females have tusks, only male Asian elephants have valuable tusks.
The scientists recorded the animal’s tusk length and its thickness, shape of the ear lobe, shoulder height, tail length, brush characteristics and scars. Analysing the data, the team was able to identify 134 individual male elephants in a population of 991 elephants, with an adult male and female ratio of 1 to 4.33.
The two reserves house a part of what is probably Asia’s largest single elephant population. The complex includes Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, the Bandipur-Nagarhole forests, Wayanad in Kerala and Biligiri Rangaswamy temple complex of Karnataka.
The area is estimated to have a minimum of 6,300 elephants, according to an assessment made by the Wildlife Trust of India.
However, according to the last elephant census carried out in 2005, the Nilgiri-Eastern Ghat region comprising these forests houses 7,962 elephants in 2005 – a drop from 8,811 tuskers of 2002. Nationally, the elephant population has increased marginally from 20,696 in 2002 to 21,300 in 2005.
“Our method is not yet operational. But it can be applied to other reserves. If male tuskers can be identified, the incidences of man-animal conflict can come down as counter-strategies can be evolved to prevent a specific male tusker from destroying villages and fields,” he said. The new method complements traditional survey techniques, which can gauge overall elephant densities and sex ratios at population levels, but are unable to monitor demographics of male elephants.
“The rigor of this technique can help us achieve conservation success with Asian elephants, which are threatened in 13 countries,” said Dr Ullas Karanth, a co-author of the study.
