Endangered

Asian elephant decline, African elephant extinction, Panda diplomacy endangered, Asia's disappearing dolphins

May 04, 2023

UPDATE: Despite their iconic status and long association with humans, Asian elephants are one of the most endangered large mammals. Believed to number between 45,000 and 50,000 individuals worldwide, they are at risk throughout Asia due to human activities such as deforestation, mining, dam building and road construction, which have damaged numerous ecosystems.

Africa is the world’s most diverse continent for large mammals such as antelopes, zebras and elephants. The heaviest of these large mammals top the scales at over one ton, and are referred to as megafauna. In fact, it’s the only continent that has not seen a mass extinction of these megafauna.

The thrilling sight may soon be no more than a memory, as numbers of the endangered mammals dwindle despite efforts to preserve them. Cambodia has announced tough new restrictions on fishing in the vast river to try and reduce the number of dolphins killed in nets. But in a country with limited financial resources, it's a huge challenge to enforce the rules on a river hundreds of metres wide that is dotted with islets and lined with dense undergrowth.

Asian Elephant Demise

Despite their iconic status and long association with humans, Asian elephants are one of the most endangered large mammals. Believed to number between 45,000 and 50,000 individuals worldwide, they are at risk throughout Asia due to human activities such as deforestation, mining, dam building and road construction, which have damaged numerous ecosystems.

In a newly published study, the centuries-long history of Asian landscapes that were once suitable elephant habitat. As a species, Asian elephants are extremely adaptable: They can live in seasonally dry forests, grasslands or the densest of rain forests. The home-range sizes of Asian elephants can vary anywhere from a few hundred square miles to a few thousand. Wild Asian elephants were studied in 13 countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

Land-use patterns changed significantly on every continent starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and extending through the colonial era into the mid-20th century. Asia was no exception. For most areas suitable elephant habitat took a steep dive around this time. From 1700 through 2015 the total amount of suitable habitat decreased by 64%. More than 3 million square kilometers of land were converted for plantations, industry and urban development. With respect to potential elephant habitat, most of the change occurred in India and China, each of which saw conversion in more than 80% of these landscapes.

In other areas of Southeast Asia, such as a large hot spot of elephant habitat in central Thailand, habitat loss happened in the mid-20th century. This timing corresponds to logging concurrent with the so-called Green Revolution, which introduced industrial agriculture to many parts of the world. If you were an elephant in the 1700s, you might have been able to range across 40% of the available habitat in Asia, because it was one large contiguous area that contained many ecosystems. This enabled gene flow among many elephant populations. However, by 2015, human activities had so drastically fragmented the total suitable area for elephants that the largest patch of good habitat represented less than 7% of the total.

Sri Lanka and peninsular Malaysia have a disproportionately high share of Asia’s wild elephant population, relative to available elephant habitat area. Thailand and Myanmar have smaller populations relative to area. Interestingly, the latter are countries known for their large captive or semi-captive elephant populations.

Less than half of the areas that contain wild elephants today have adequate habitat for them. Elephants’ resulting use of increasingly human-dominated landscapes leads to confrontations that are harmful for both elephants and people.

However, this long view of history reminds us that protected areas alone are not the answer, since they simply cannot be large enough to support elephant populations. Indeed, human societies have shaped these very landscapes for millennia.

Today there is a pressing challenge to balance human subsistence and livelihood requirements with the needs of wildlife. Restoring traditional forms of land management and local stewardship of these landscapes can be an essential part of protecting and recovering ecosystems that serve both people and wildlife in the future.

Elephants Shaped Africa

The continent’s megafauna community includes the world’s largest terrestrial mammal, the African elephant. Adult African bush elephants can weigh as much as 6 tons. Other giants across African continent include hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses and giraffes. So, it is only in Africa that ecological interactions and dynamics can be studied as they would have been before the sudden and profound flourishing of Homo sapiens over the past 12 000 years; before then, megafauna would have dominated all terrestrial landscapes on all continents. A visit to Africa is, in other words, a visit to our planet’s past.

It’s not just a tale of megafauna and other well-known large mammals. Small mammals, such as mice, bats and shrews are also generally overlooked by both scientists and the public. But without them, and the ways in which they’ve interacted with each other and with their larger cousins over tens of thousands years, Africa wouldn’t have the richly varied landscapes it does today.

Africa’s mammals are a global treasure that must be protected. However, the lives of local communities are inextricably linked with these mammals and the remaining natural landscapes that harbour their dwindling populations; conservation solutions will require these communities’ active participation and blessing.

In some areas, nature-based tourism may be a viable solution. However, much of the rest of the continent – where no tourists go – will require other, perhaps novel, approaches. What we cannot afford is the extinction of any of these beautiful creatures or the continued loss and reduction of the ecosystem services that they freely provide.

The history of African mammals begins with an apparently unrelated group of creatures. They’re so dissimilar from each other today that taxonomists didn’t work out their true relationships until about two decades ago. These are the elephants, manatees, elephant shrews, African golden moles, hyraxes and tenrecs. Collectively they make up the super-order Afrotheria.

Today, this group accounts for only a small fraction of the mammal species on the continent. But that is only because Africa – which formed part of the prehistoric southern supercontinent of Gondwana – was colonised, in stages and over millions of years, by ‘invaders’ from the northern supercontinent of Laurasia.

These colonists include nearly all the mammals that we normally associate with Africa, including rhinoceroses, zebras, antelopes, primates, bats and even rodents. In return, some Afrotherians, including elephants, roamed out of Africa to colonise other lands further north.

Other mammals, including monkeys and caviomorph rodents (such as guinea pigs and capybaras), used Africa as a stepping stone to colonise South America, as did lemurs to colonise Madagascar.

In the continent’s interior, other formidable barriers restrict and determine mammal movement. Long, deep, fast-flowing rivers, such as the Congo in central Africa, can be almost as effective a barrier as open oceans. Mountain ranges can form inland ‘islands’ that are as ecologically isolated as their ocean equivalents.

By providing barriers, geographical features limit the movement of animals across the landscape, thereby affecting the composition of mammal communities in different parts of the continent.

Megafauna play important roles in shaping the landscape and its plant communities. This in turn shapes many smaller animals’ habitats. Hippopotamuses in the Okavango Delta create and maintain open water channels, which serve as critical habitat for fishes. And, by defecating in water, hippos also introduce vast amounts of organic fertiliser into this aquatic ecosystem, helping to enrich it.

The numbers of animals naturally fluctuate over time, typically reflecting fluctuations in food supply brought about by, for example, droughts or floods. A key determinant of these population fluctuations is also the inherent life history characteristics of a species: short-lived, fast reproducing species such as rats and mice will, by definition, experience greater fluctuations in their numbers than long-lived, slow reproducing species like elephants.

This is not true on other continents, where humans are – in geological timescales – a recent addition. It may well be that this long relationship between humans and other African mammals is the reason why, despite the losses wrought by humankind, so many large mammals persist on the continent: they have ‘learnt’ through natural selection how to survive with us.

The end of panda diplomacy

The controversy over the death and the bad health of a couple of giant pandas named Le Le, 25, and Ya Ya, 23, female, living at the Memphis Zoo in the US has saddened global panda lovers and some Chinese people question whether it is time to end "panda diplomacy." But it is always more than diplomacy or using the cute animal to drive visitor numbers, experts said, noting that the giant panda on-loan practice has already been a huge impetus for global scientific cooperation to protect this precious species shared by humanity.

Amid public concern, an expert team had been sent from China to the US Memphis zoo recently and delved into Le Le's cause of death and the health condition of Ya Ya. According to the evaluation, Le Le died of heart disease and Ya Ya remains in a stable physical condition except for hair loss caused by skin disease. Ya Ya, who lived 20 years at a United States zoo, is back in China after a controversy over her health played out against the backdrop of a souring relationship between Beijing and Washington.

Ya Ya arrived in Shanghai on Thursday afternoon to a social media storm. Panda lovers who could not make it to the airport launched what they called an online pick-up for Ya Ya.

“We welcome Ya Ya’s return online” had chalked up 340 million reads on the Chinese messaging platform Sina Weibo by the time her 16-hour flight from Memphis, Tennessee, touched down. The Sina Weibo hashtag “Ya Ya has landed in Shanghai” had been viewed 430 million times as of Thursday evening.

Ya Ya returned to China on a special flight a year after reports began circulating that she and Le Le, the Memphis Zoo’s male panda, were in poor health. Le Le’s death in February and the emergence of pictures online of Ya Ya looking thin and bony only added to the concerns among panda lovers not only in China but also in the US and elsewhere. China maintains contact with overseas zoos over the condition of giant pandas in order to timely support the living of them in overseas or rectify issues identified overseas zoos.

In January 2020, for example, China Wildlife Conservation Association sent a formal letter to South Korea's Everland Zoo after finding that the zoo violated the professional requirements for the protection of giant pandas as it organized performance-related personnel to have close contact with giant panda cubs during entertainment programs, requesting the zoo to immediately stop such activities, stop broadcasting or distributing the videos, and further strengthen scientific rigor.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China has given around 23 giant pandas to nine countries as a token of friendship and goodwill, according to media reports. The Chinese government put an end to the give-away policy in 1982 due to the scarcity of the species and the need for better protection of the animal.

The pandas are then offered on loan usually on cooperative research terms from China to some countries and regions, during which any resultant offspring from breeding efforts remains owned by China and sent back to China usually by four years of age for mating.

According to media reports, American zoos have to spend up to $1 million a year to rent just one of the animals. Most zoos sign a 10-year contract and would rent a couple at a time out of consideration for reproduction. And if any baby cubs are born, they pay an additional one-time $400,000 to China.

That doesn't even include extra costs like the panda's enclosure, medical care, and mountains of bamboo. Before Ya Ya and Le Le arrived in 2003, the Memphis Zoo spent $16 million to build a giant panda facility with traditional Chinese cultural elements, set up a breeding management and veterinary team, and planted about four hectares of bamboo.

In the Panda house in Doha that covers about 120,000 square meters, there is a team with some 10 experts to take care of a pair of giant pandas, Jing Jing and Sihai who started to live here in 2022. The team told media that they had learned Sichuan dialect, the language of the natural habitat of giant pandas, in order to cater to Jing Jing and Sihai's habits.

Eight hundred kilograms of fresh bamboo will be flown in each week to feed them, according to media reports. The huge popularity of giant pandas is one of the motivations that kept driving many countries and regions to rent pandas from China despite the rocket-high fees.

Before Xiang Xiang, born in June 2017 at Ueno Zoo in Japan, returned to China on February 21, floods of panda lovers flocked to the Ueno Zoo to say goodbye to her. Admission to see the giant panda was limited to a preselected lottery of 2,600 entries a day. The final time slot on February 19 was so popular that there were around 70 times as many applicants as there were available entries.

Among the 60 on-loan giant pandas in the world, Japan reportedly owns the second largest number with nine, following the US with 11. But loaning pandas nowadays is more than "diplomacy" or just bringing in more visitors into zoos.

The key lies in the friendly and close people-to-people exchanges at civil level between China and overseas countries and regions. Considered to be a living fossil, the joint research on giant panda conservation has become a symbol of people-to-people exchanges, scientific research, and biodiversity conservation between China and other countries, which has always been valued and taken seriously by all parties, experts noted.

The fees paid to China and the incomes of the zoos via giant pandas will be poured back to the reservation of them and the overseas zoos and institutes having giant pandas would communicate and exchange techniques and experience on giant panda raising and reproduction to help make sure the valuable species survive.

During the past 10 years, the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda has set up an international and domestic cooperation and exchange platform on giant pandas, attracting 16 countries and regions to join and helping successfully breed 21 giant panda cubs overseas, the center announced in October 2022.

The number of captive giant pandas across the world reached 673, nearly double the number from a decade ago. The wild giant panda population in China has risen from 1,114 in the 1980s to 1,864, while the protected habitats for the species have also expanded significantly during the same period, according to the center.

In 2013, the Edinburgh zoo's overall income jumped by more than 5 million pounds ($5,991,250) to nearly 15 million and the number of visitors leapt by 51 percent following the arrival of Tian Tian and Yang Guang in late December 2011.

The debut of Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing at the National Zoo in Washington DC, the US, in April 1972 attracted more than 20,000 people far and wide and the number of visitors for the first month was as many as 110,000, arousing Panda-mania across the country.

Cambodia's river dolphins expiring

"We fear we cannot protect them," says river guard Phon Pharong during a patrol searching for illegal gillnets. Gillnets -- vertical mesh nets left in the water for long periods -- trap fish indiscriminately and are the main cause of death for dolphins in the Mekong, according to conservationists.

Pharong is one of more than 70 guards who patrol a 120-kilometre (75-mile) stretch of the Mekong from northeastern Kratie province to close to the Laos border. The guards say their efforts are hampered by limited resources -- and intimidation by fishing gangs. Mok Ponlork, a fisheries department official who leads the dolphin conservation guards in Kratie, has 44 people to monitor an 85-kilometre stretch but says to do the job effectively he would need at least 60.

Without the staffing, the guards know they are playing a losing game of cat and mouse with those fishing the river. "If we patrol at night, they don't go. When we return at daytime, they go in the river," Pharong said. Low wages mean guards are forced to take extra work onshore to support their families, taking them away from patrol duties. Each guard receives about $65 a month from the government, while WWF funds another $5 for a day of patrolling.

Irrawaddy dolphins -- small, shy creatures with domed foreheads and short beaks -- once swam through much of the mighty Mekong, all the way to the delta in Vietnam. Illegal fishing and plastic waste have killed many, and the dolphins' habitat has been reduced by upstream dams and climate change, which have had a major impact on water levels in the river. The population in the Mekong has dwindled from 200, when the first census was taken in 1997, to just 89 in 2020.

The species lives in only two other rivers: Myanmar's Ayeyarwady and the Mahakam in Indonesia, according to WWF. The three river populations are listed as critically endangered on the IUCN red list of threatened species. Found in fresh and salt water, Irrawaddy dolphins are slightly more numerous in coastal areas of South and Southeast Asia -- though even there they are classed as endangered. Adding to concerns about the Mekong dolphins' future, around 70 percent of the population is now too old to breed.

Eleven Mekong dolphins died last year, but in December the deaths of three healthy breeding-aged dolphins entangled in fishing nets and lines within a week raised particular alarm among conservationists. "It's kind of a worrying sign," Seng Teak, WWF-Cambodia Country Director, told AFP.

"We do need a lot in order to make sure that this species continues to survive in the Mekong," he said, calling on the government "to mobilise more resources into dolphin protection". In late February, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen issued a new law creating protection zones in which fishing is banned. Violators face up to a year in jail for using gillnets and up to five years for electrofishing in the conservation areas.

Many locals who make a living taking tourists to see dolphins or selling related souvenirs are also worried about the mammals' future."If the dolphins are gone, we are over because our income is from dolphins," said Meas Mary, 53, who makes up to $15 a day running boat trips. "Before there were a lot of dolphins. Now they are disappearing. I am so worried."

Long Mekong

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