Uncertain fate for S. Africa's giants

PILANESBERG NATIONAL PARK, South Africa -- Ecologist Rudi van Aarde leaned back on a veranda that overlooked dry grasslands and a group of bull elephants, his shoes still dusty from an 8,000-mile tour of game reserves in southern Africa. Van Aarde was on a mission: saving elephants from sanctioned killings.

The overpopulation of elephants in parks throughout southern Africa has reached a crisis stage, most conservationists agree, and South Africa soon will consider whether to cull its herds. It would be the first culling on the continent in a decade. Proponents say it is necessary because the elephants are fast destroying valuable woodlands in many parks, including some 2,000-year-old thick-trunked baobabs.

But van Aarde, head of the Conservation Ecology Research Unit at the University of Pretoria, and a collection of animal rights groups and zoologists hope to avoid culling by expanding newly created transnational parks. In this way, they hope to link the seven largest clusters of elephants in southern Africa.

Their theory, which they call "Megaparks for Metapopulations," is that by merging herds with high and low reproduction rates, and then drying up many water holes, the numbers of the world's largest land mammals will reduce more naturally.

They don't have much time to make their case. Public hearings on how best to manage the growing elephant herds, including the option of culling, are scheduled for next month in Kruger National Park in northeastern South Africa.

"This is a problem that man induced," said van Aarde at dusk one day last week, relaxing on the veranda of an open-air restaurant in Pilanesberg National Park, a small reserve crowded with nearly 180 elephants. He had just returned from a five-week trip in a Land Rover through Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. "We reduced their range and forced the elephants into fenced-in areas and then artificially created water holes. The populations grew rapidly. What did we expect?"

Those who favor culling the herds, he said, are "only dealing with a symptom of the problem. It's a short-term solution. I think we need to deal with what caused the problem in the first place."

But those who favor culling include respected ecologists who acknowledge that they are trying to solve a vexing problem in which all the viable options are risky. Given current reproduction rates in Kruger National Park and Chobe National Park in northern Botswana, they say that if half the herds were killed, it would take a dozen years to return to today's numbers.

"No one wants to go out and cull elephants," said Jeremy Anderson, a South African wildlife consultant. "Say we take off half of the elephants; it will take 12 years to get back to where you were. [But] if you don't take them off, and you're wrong about the baobabs, it will take us 2,000 years to replace them, or wrong about the soil, it will take us 2 million years to replace that. No one is looking at the big picture and the loss of biodiversity."

Africa's elephants once roamed the continent wherever water and trees were plentiful, but their range today, while still spread over 37 countries, has been vastly reduced because of development and the once-lucrative trade in ivory. In 1979, the African elephant population was estimated at more than 1.3 million; a decade later, the widespread slaughter for ivory had reduced those numbers by half.

In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species placed a worldwide ban on the trade in ivory and other elephant products. The ban had an immediate effect, vastly shrinking the market for poachers. But because the elephants' traditional range in western and central Africa was greatly reduced, the numbers of elephants there stabilized or continued to dwindle.

Southern Africa is a different story. It is home to about 300,000 of the continent's estimated population of 400,000 to 600,000 elephants; about 80 percent of the region's elephants are in northern Botswana and Zimbabwe, in the vast region stretching from Chobe to Hwange to Lower Zambezi. South Africa has about 17,000 elephants in 75 fenced-in parks, and specialists estimate that the numbers of elephants exceed the capacity of the land in three-quarters of those populations.

Elephants are herbivores with a great appetite for trees. They use their versatile trunks to snap branches and strip off leaves and bark; some bulls level mature trees, snapping the roots with relative ease. They eat about 5 percent of their weight daily, which means 150 pounds of vegetation for a young bull.

The environmental destruction can be negligible if elephants have wide areas to roam.

But in southern Africa, they don't, and it means that they have turned some forest areas into grassland or denuded the land in ways that opens it to erosion.

In Botswana, the government determined in 1991 that its population of 54,000 elephants was the maximum its parks could handle without severe environmental damage. Today, the number of elephants is estimated at more than 120,000.

"It has more than doubled," said Joseph Matlhare, director of Botswana's Wildlife & National Parks, in a telephone interview from Gaborone, the capital. "So you can imagine the issues we deal with. We see the widespread destruction of vegetation. It is a major concern."

In November, Botswana will host a meeting on elephant overpopulation involving government wildlife specialists from Angola, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. Botswana has never had a culling program, and Matlhare declined to discuss the politically volatile issue. He said the governments in the region want to push ahead with developing transnational parks and creating new corridors for elephants. But he said many issues remain, including securing funds and sorting out the different agendas of the countries. "When . . . they all have different land uses and different issues, it's not an easy thing," he said.

Botswana is exploring another option -- moving some elephants to neighboring countries. Angola and Mozambique are obvious choices because their elephant populations were virtually wiped out by poachers during civil wars.

Three years ago, Botswana offered 300 elephants to Angola for free, as long as Angola paid for the transportation. Angola airlifted only 16. Earlier this year, Botswana made the same deal with Mozambique, offering 500 elephants; conservationists in the region think few, if any, will go.

One reason is the cost: about $2,000 per elephant for a long-distance move.

There is also the logistical difficulty of moving an elephant. First, handlers must round up a family of elephants and shoot each with a tranquilizer. When they wake up, the elephants are forced to back into a truck trailer that can hold 14 females and calves. Bulls must be housed in their own container because of the risk they post to other elephants.

Some elephants have been moved in cargo planes, but the hull is only tall enough for calves and small female elephants, according to Markus Hofmeyr, head of veterinary wildlife services at Kruger National Park.

Scientists have explored another option, female contraception, in the past two decades. Some dismiss it as prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive, but Rob Slotow of the Amarula Elephant Research Program at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban said he has had success in several smaller South African parks.

Opponents of culling also worry that such killings may lead to lifting the worldwide ban on ivory sales. Opening the market, they say, could encourage poachers to kill elephants in protected areas as well.

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.