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Elephant Conservation
 The lure of white tusk trophies made African elephants a prime target among hunters through the latter part of this century. As a result, elephant populations plummeted from an estimated 1.3 million in 1979 to roughly 600,000 just ten years later. Through the work of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other conservation groups, which provided data showing the elephant's decline, a ban on the trade in ivory was finally enacted in 1989.
Today, WCS scientists focus on forest elephants, the secretive subspecies rarely seen by scientists. For more than ten years, WCS biologist Andrea Turkalo has studied these animals in the Dzanga Bai, a remote 30-acre forest clearing in Central African Republic. Here elephants gather, digging for salt and minerals to supplement their diet of leaves, bark, grasses and fruit. Turkalo has counted an unprecedented 2,500 individuals representing 300 family groups by using ear tears and body scars as the animal's "fingerprint." During her studies, she has discovered a complex social order among elephant family groups, consisting of a matriarchy led by mature females. Mature males, she has learned, are more solitary.
While Turkalo remains in one study area, biologist Steve Blake does the opposite, tracking these ponderous beasts for sometimes months at a time using satellite transmitters as they roam through the forest. Blake and Turkalo's data will help provide much-needed information on how elephants use the forest. These data, in turn will be incorporated into a pilot program initiated by WCS and other partners, that monitors elephants throughout the Congo basin.
In other areas WCS provides technical expertise to safeguard elephants in the Ituri Forest in Democratic Republic of Congo, Mouaje Bai in Congo, and Tarangire National Park in Tanzania, where poaching for the illegal ivory trade still looms. In Cameroon, where abundant local elephant populations have become giant-sized crop raiders, WCS works with communities to address this problem by recommending changes in planting patterns and testing methods to frighten elephants, rather then destroy them.
Like so many African wildlife species, elephants face threats from burgeoning human pressures. WCS believes that it is only through an ongoing, coordinated effort among conservationists, governments, and most importantly, the people who live alongside these awe-inspiring beasts, that elephant conservation will succeed.
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