Out of the woods and into the light with elephants

Bas: [00:00:00] Forest elephants live in the tropical forest on the African continent. And, these forests would look completely different if it would not be for the forest elephant. About one third of the hardwood species in the Congo Basin forest are known to be eaten and dispersed by forest elephants.

So, without forest elephants, those tree species would go extinct.

Alexander: Did you know that there are actually two different species of elephants in Africa? The African savanna elephant and their lesser-known cousin, the African forest elephant.

I'm Alexander Nicolas. Welcome to Wildlife Café. And in this episode, I'm talking to Bas Huijbregts, Director of African species conservation at WWF, a whole lot more about this lesser-known forest-dwelling cousin and bring their story out of the woods.

World Wildlife Fund's Wildlife Café is a space for conversations where passion, biodiversity, and conservation, all converge.

So, whether you're a conservationist yourself, conservation supporter, or a wildlife lover, this is the place for you.

So top up that mug of yours and thank you for joining us at Wildlife Café.

[00:01:00]

Alexander: Hi Bas. It's great to see you.

Bas: Great to see you too, Alexander.

Alexander: Thanks so much for joining Wildlife Café.

Bas: Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Alexander: Great. I'm really excited to be talking with you to hear more about and learn more about African forest elephants. And I've got a ton of questions, but before all that, I couldn't help but notice the painting behind you, which looks a lot like elephant ivory. So I wanted to ask you about that. What's the significance of that picture to you?

Bas: Well, yeah, thanks for asking.

It actually is a painting that my mother made of a picture that I took, just before she passed away. And you might be able to see that she actually never be able to finish it. And I took a picture of a stockpile of ivory in Gabon, in June, 2012, when the Gabon government destroyed their entire government held stockpile about 10,000 pounds, sort of representing around 900 elephants.

So their entire stockpile was burned that day, as a strong symbol of that [00:02:00] country that they were serious in combating elephant poaching, and giving a strong signal to both poachers that they shouldn't come and poach in their country, but also to potential consumers of ivory, that this is an illegal international commodity and it results in the death of elephants.

So, yeah, that was sort of a pride of my work at that time, because we contributed in auditing that stockpile for a year before, together with TRAFFIC. So, that's the picture.

Alexander: Well, it is a very beautiful picture, so thank you for sharing. And very fitting topically, since I wanted to talk to you about African elephants or African forest elephants in particular.

And elephants have really been such an icon and symbol of the conservation movement for many years. And while there are actually three species in the world, two in Africa, one in Asia, less is talked about as much as the African savanna elephant. But their cousin, the African forest elephant, wasn't always considered to be an entirely different species, until relatively recently.

So I wanted to ask you why [00:03:00] that was the case and how did it come about to finally acknowledge a separate forest elephant species in Africa.

Bas: Yeah, no, that's a good question. And it's a question that I asked myself all those years that I was working in the Congo Basin is how can they not be separate? Just already for a layman person, you can see that they are different. They really look different.

Forest elephants are way smaller than savanna elephants, really much smaller.

Their ears are different. So savanna elephants, everybody knows savanna elephants from pictures. So they have this sort of Africa continent, oval shaped, wide ears, whereas forest elephant ears are much smaller, round, and can ply back to their body so that they almost disappear, fold into their backs.

And then also their tusks. So, savanna elephants, they have these large tusks that stick out sort of at the side of their heads and curve upwards.

Whereas forest elephants, their tusks are much straighter, almost completely straight and they go downwards. Both are sort of adaptations of them living in a dense [00:04:00] forest, so that these things that stick out of their bodies don't get stuck in dense underground.

So, everybody already sort of knew it, but it was only not that long ago that after, let's say, several studies, including DNA studies, that it was really proven that these two species sort of genetically separated almost 2 million years ago, actually. So, it was only in 2021 that they were officially recognized by IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, as two separate species.

And immediately, the forest elephant was then classified as critically endangered versus its savanna cousin, classified as endangered. So yeah, it's all recent and exciting because it gives more momentum and more international recognition to that species. And the forest elephant really needs that.

Alexander: Yeah, very exciting indeed. And so given that there are these two recognized different species of African elephant who live in these [00:05:00] different habitats, in the forest environment, what is the role then that an elephant plays in their forest ecosystems?

Bas: So, first of all, forest elephants, they live in the tropical forest on the African continent. So all the way from Senegal in the West to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the East. And its heartland is really, let's say the Congo Basin region. With its most important country being Gabon, followed by the Republic of Congo and Cameroon. And these forests would look completely different if it would not be for the forest elephant. First of all, forest elephants are big eaters of fruit. So more than 500 species of trees are known to be dispersed by forest elephants through them eating their seeds. And as you can imagine, a big elephant eats a lot of fruit each day.

And they're also large roaming animals. So, an elephant can eat a fruit in the morning and dispose the seed in a very [00:06:00] fertile dung pile 60 kilometers away from that tree, creating the ideal conditions for germination of the next fruit tree species. So that is a very important function, is seed dispersal.

So about one third of the hardwood species in the Congo Basin forest are known to be eaten and dispersed by forest elephants. And there's even some tree species that can only regenerate after their seeds have passed through the gut of a forest elephant.

So without forest elephants, those tree species would go extinct.

Then also, forest elephants, they eat, not only fruit, but also bark and leaves and grasses. And by doing that, they create all these openings and clearings in the forest. They also create what they call this "elephant boulevards", these highways that have been used by generations of elephants to go from one fruiting tree to another over huge distances and thereby also creating, let's say, all these openings and habitats and access for other wildlife to [00:07:00] food sources.

And then lastly, which is sort of more recently discovered is their role as a sort of a, very important ally in combating climate change. So, by their foraging behavior, they eat a lot of fast growing softwood species. And by doing that, they create, let's say, more light and more nutrients for those tall species in the forest, those hardwood species that grow very big and very tall. And those are the trees that store all that carbon.

So, basically, experts have estimated that the forest without forest elephants would have 30 billion tons of carbon less than with elephant activity.

And the International Monetary Fund recently even calculated that the elephant over its lifespan is worth, let's say, 1. 6 million U. S. dollars just by indirectly contributing to carbon storage, if you would be able to sell that carbon on, let's say, voluntary market. So yeah, important [00:08:00] function in the forest, really.

Alexander: I mean, they're amazing. And even just talking about "elephant boulevards", I would love to visit

Bas: Oh yeah.

Alexander: and see what an "elephant

boulevard" is like. That's incredible. Wow. And you are clearly very passionate about elephant conservation and as Director of African species conservation at WWF, you've been working in this field for quite some time, so I'd love to know more about what it was that initially drew you to want to work on wildlife conservation, and also if you've seen a forest elephant in the wild in person?

Bas: From a young age, I was always sort of fascinated by wilderness areas, just sort of disappearing into a forestand just being far away from humans and just having that feeling that there is all this wilderness out there and those tropical forests.

When I was a kid, I heard about the Amazon and Borneo. But when I then understood that there is forest where you also have this megafauna like forest elephants, forest buffalo, great apes like gorillas and chimpanzees, I really sort of zoomed in when I was at university on the Congo Basin and managed to land my first sort [00:09:00] of job there in 1996. And then my first sort of like dream job for World Wildlife Fund in the field two years later.

And that's when I started to see all those elephant encounters. That first job, for instance, in that country, WWF was tasked by the government of Gabon to help identify the best area to create a new national park, a new protected area in the north of that country, in a huge wilderness as large as Belgium, called the Minkébé Forest.

So I spent the first two years working for WWF, mostly doing surveys in that forest, to basically come up with like rough estimates of distribution of elephants, great apes, land use types.

So that's where I had my first many elephant encounters, some of them beautiful, some of them scary.

Alexander: Wow. Well, I would imagine then you've been a long early champion for the acknowledgement of them as a distinct species. And there's no doubt about the tremendous role that they [00:10:00] play in the wild.

I mean, you were just going through so many of the reasons, what incredible creatures they are. But, why did it take so long to recognize them as their own species? Because I would assume a big part maybe has to do with the difficulty of seeing themand then monitoring them in the wild. So, how do you even begin to approach how to monitor forest elephants?

Bas: Yeah, no, that's a very good question. Just to give you an example, just recently, five Southern African countries, that together hold 50 percent of Africa's savanna elephants, completed their first-ever coordinated survey of elephants, to see indeed if that estimate of 50 percent of Africa's savanna elephants was really true. And, they basically counted those elephants in three months.

They had seven aircrafts in the air, with observers in those aircrafts looking down and literally counting those elephants from the sky. A really amazing exercise, which you cannot do in a tropical forest. So [00:11:00] elephants are hidden in the canopy. They are hidden in those forests. You can't count them from the air.

When you enter this green abyss, you have very limited visibility.

So traditionally, forest elephants are counted by basically counting their indirect sign, the things they leave behind. And the easiest things you can see what elephants leave behind is their poop, their dung. So, basically what people do is creating line transects, so straight lines in those forests and counting dung along the way and then establishing what age is that dung, and based on those models, extrapolate, let's say, densities of elephants in a given area. So, when you hear today estimates of let's say 150,000 forest elephants, that is based on surveys of thousands of different people, across all those forest elephant range states, doing that.

So that is how they do it, have been doing it all [00:12:00] these years, but there is all this research happening to modernize forest elephant surveys, for instance, through identification of individuals through DNA, coming out of their dung, but also through camera traps. So,artificial intelligence models are being trained to identify not only an elephant from, let's say, human on the picture, but also to identify individuals from pictures. And, also promising for the future is acoustic monitoring. So for instance, there is some places where elephants come out in forest clearings when they look for mineral salts, and that's where you can actually see them.

And in one of those places called Dzanga-Sangha in Central Africa Republic, researchers know a lot of individuals by name, they recognize individuals and they put acoustic monitors there and record the noises, the voices those elephants make, and they [00:13:00] are trying to learn those algorithms, not only to identify the different meaning of the sound, so the elephant language, but also at one stage, they will be able to identify individuals from those sounds.

And when we get there, then you can start to put those acoustic video recorders everywhere in the forest and count your elephants, just by listening to the forest.

Alexander: Wow. Well, so, given that we're beginning to learn more about African forest elephants in the wild, and that they are critically endangered, like you were just saying before, what are the major threats and pressures that are driving that status today? And are there similarities or differences with their savanna cousins?

Bas: Yeah. So the biggest threat for forest elephants is hunting, is killing them for their ivory tusks. That is the same for savanna elephants, but especially for forest elephants, because of the fact that many of those countries where forest elephants [00:14:00] live, they have much less capacity in managing their wildlife resources than in some of the range states of savanna elephants.

Elephant poaching is by far the most accurate threat. And elephant poaching for ivory is not recent. They've always been hunted, for instance, during the Colonial era. Hundreds of thousands of elephants were killed for things like billiard balls or piano keys in the West. But, the last sort of 30 years, elephant poaching in these Congo Basin forests really accelerated rapidly with the increased demand for elephant ivory in Southeast Asia and mainly China, resulting in a 89 percent drop of elephant populations over that timeframe. So, really a very drastic drop. So, that's the first and most accurate issue for forest elephants. But then also, these forests are more and more being converted for industrial agricultural [00:15:00] purposes, such as palm oil, which already happened on vast scales in Southeast Asia.

And there is this wave coming to the central Africa region as well. But there's also human populations are growing in the area, and people need to live, so they create agricultural fields in elephant range, further destroying or fragmenting elephant habitat. But also just the fact that elephants come close to humans more and more, you have also an increased occurrence of human-elephant conflict, and sometimes that results even in retaliatory killings of farmers that try to protect themselves or their fields from elephants.

So that's another issue is indeed habitat loss.

Alexander: Well, then to address this broad breadth of issues and to protect forest elephants, what has WWF been doing?

Bas: So WWF knows the Congo Basin region really well. WWF has been working [00:16:00] there since 30 plus years. WWF has offices in all the important forest elephant range states. We are present in most of the most important forest elephant landscapes with long lasting field programs, so staff in those areas. And the first thing that WWF has done and which remains the most important one, the strongholds for elephants is the protected area networks in those countries.

So each of those countries, they have at least, and most of them, more than 10 percent of the national territory in protected areas.

So the creation and management of those protected areas has always been a priority for WWF.

More and more, we also try to expand the protected area model to areas under conservation in areas that are managed by communities or Indigenous people or also promote elephant protection on private lands.

A recent study came out that showed that forest concessions that are managed by [00:17:00] FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council, are really managing much better the elephant populations than a non-certified concession. WWF has been one of the founding fathers of FSC and is a big supporter today, and we're helping, let's say, private landowners indeed making sure that their management regimes are appropriate for elephants, so that elephants can also roam across those vast forest landscapes and not only are restricted in national parks. So those are a couple of the things we have been doing in the region. And then also very importantly on the demand side, when the poaching stops, the elephants are more or less secured.

So, it is not only working on anti-poaching and protection in the region, but also very much working in the demand countries on reducing demands. So, it's awareness raising campaigns. It is also strengthening rule of law in those countries, and addressing, let's say, wildlife trafficking, but also looking at champions in these countries that tell the story, for every elephant trinket, an [00:18:00] elephant died, and create, let's say, a negative vibe around ivory, versus now the vibe of showing that it's a status symbol, it's a symbol of success.

Alexander: Looking back on your career, Bas, working in conservation, a champion, as you were just saying yourself and working on African species conservation, with what you knew then and what you know now, I know this is a big question, but what do you want the future to look like for African forest elephants and how can everyone help in realizing that future?

Bas: Yeah. So, first of all, the protected areas in the Congo Basin need to be well managed. We cannot ask for the governments of those poor countries to do that on their own. So that future isan approach where governments are

supported by organizations as ourselves in the day to day management of these huge protected areas.

Secondly, since elephants are a large roaming species, even those huge protected areas are not big enough for elephants. So they need to be able to move between protected [00:19:00] areas.

So, the vision is to have, let's say, intact forest landscapes that connect elephant habitats from one protected area to another, to either private land or land owned and managed by local and Indigenous people.

That is sort of the vision.

And that takes a village, and it also takes quite a bit of funding, and that funding cannot come only from nature conservation, traditional nature conservation sources. So, the hope is also that funding from climate sources, so combating climate change funds through carbon funds, etc.

So, innovative mechanisms, financial mechanisms, come into play to protect the forest and their elephants.

Alexander: It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you, Bas, and just like African forest elephants do, beginning to plant those seeds of knowledge about who they are and how we can be a part of their story, and it all starts, like you were saying, with [00:20:00] acknowledging that they are here. So, thank you for being their voice and for joining Wildlife Café to share more about their story and your conservation journey.

Bas: Thank you so much. It was fun. Thanks.

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Out of the woods and into the light with elephants

Out of the woods and into the light with African forest elephants

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