Population of African elephants drastically down due to loss of habitat and poaching

A study has revealed that the population of African elephants has reduced drastically due to not only poaching for their ivory but also due to loss of habitat. This has, in turn, raised questions about the failure to protect one of the world's largest mammals.
The study has shown that there are now only 352,271 savanna elephants in nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa. This is as per data furnished by Elephants Without Borders, a research organization that just completed an 18-country census.
This has been reported in nzherald.co.nz dated 1 September 2016.

The study has found that between 2007 and 2014, the elephant population has declined by at least 30 per cent, or 144,000 elephants. The study, which was funded largely by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has also revealed that Tanzania's elephant population declined by 53 per cent between 2009 and 2015, from about 109,000 in 2009 to 51,000 in 2015.
The researchers had spend 10,000 hours in the air traveling across Africa in helicopters and bush planes and the National Geographic has called the study "the largest wildlife census in history". Incidentally, some of the countries like Angola had never before covered by any earlier survey.
One of the reasons for this decline with regard to savanna elephants is dramatic loss of habitat - their land was destroyed and their range "shrank from three million square miles in 1979 to just over one million square miles in 2007" - this is as per the World Wildlife Fund.
Poaching is another known threat. The animals are killed for their ivory and most of the ivory ends up in Asia, where it fetches as much as US$1000 per pound and is frequently used in unproven medicinal treatments. Kenya had set fire to 105 tonnes of ivory in an attempt to prove, in the words of President Uhuru Kenyatta, that "for us, ivory is worthless unless it is on our elephants". The United States has also announced a near-total ban on the ivory trade.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org


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