Bigger parks will eradicate need to cull

As the curtain came down on the 19th Century, the then Transvaal Republic president Paul Kruger proclaimed the Sabie nature reserve, forerunner to the much larger consolidated reserve that was given his name in 1929.

Today, the Kruger National Park is hailed as one of the world's great game parks but in 1898, Kruger's move was something of a hollow gesture because the stretch of lowveld bordering Mozambique was just about devoid of animals.

And, as University of Pretoria zoologist Rudi van Aarde pointed out in his recent Cecily Niven Memorial Lecture at the Sasol Scifest in Grahamstown, that dearth of animal numbers certainly included the African elephant, of which just a handful remained.

One of the reasons was the dreaded contagious cattle disease rinderpest, which the Italians had introduced to Somalia in 1860 and which quickly spread across the continent, devastating cattle stocks and all but wiping out wild game like the big herbivores, kudu, impala and wildebeest.

Most of the elephants that didn't succumb to the disease fell victim to the rapacious ivory hunters operating around the same time.

Around 1900, the veld between the Crocodile and the Sabie rivers would have been a deathly quiet place.

But, as Van Aarde explains, there are always species quick to exploit opportunities, and this lowveld area was no exception.

"What a haven for trees! With no animals around, and especially no elephants, the trees took off. Our savannahs became woodlands."

And it's these woodlands in Kruger that the past few generations of South Africans have grown up with and become accustomed to as the "natural" vegetation of the world-famous reserve.

But, during these same years, animal populations started bouncing back, including the elephants.

"By the time that you and I became aware of nature, the thing that really struck us was that 'these bloody elephants are breaking our trees' because what we prefer is to have our trees," says Van Aarde.

It's the elephants' habit of destroying trees while grazing, thereby fundamentally altering the landscape, that is offered in some quarters as the primary reason why culling is necessary to reduce the burgeoning elephant population.

But Van Aarde doesn't buy that argument, partly because of what he considers to have been a lot of biased scientific research on the subject, and partly because of what he sees as an incorrect focus on elephant numbers in individual areas.

Instead, he insists, we should be looking at the "big picture" of all 270 000 elephants across the entire sub-region.

"Impact does not necessarily relate to numbers, and if you want to control impact, it's not about numbers, it's about something else. The problem lies elsewhere, and therefore the solution to the problem as well."

In his lecture, "A conservation alternative for African elephants: the mega-parks and meta-population metaphor", Van Aarde described the work that he and a group of 22 researchers are doing in seven "clusters" where elephants occur in southern Africa.

These clusters are Etosha/Damaraland in Namibia; Chobe in Botswana; the Kafue region in western Zambia; the Luangwa valley in eastern Zambia and parts of Malawi; the Zambezi valley between Zimbabwe and Zambia; Limpopo, as in the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park straddling South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe; and the Maputo corridor area between South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland.

Each cluster contains anything between two and 17 discrete populations of elephants which have been isolated from each other by human-induced barriers such as electric fences or agricultural areas.

Van Aarde agrees that the elephant issue is "urgent and controversial", but says more often than not personal opinion and a selective interpretation of science are offered in the debate.

And it's "very revealing" that the fundamental source of information about elephants is the Sunday papers, he adds.

"This is the primary source of the information - and, I want to claim, often mis-information - for politicians and decision makers."

He points out that during the culling era in the Kruger National Park, the managers designed an experiment for scientists by dividing the park into four blocks.

In any given year, all the elephants culled in the park were killed within just one of these blocks. This meant that, for three years, elephants would be undisturbed.

Before the cull, elephant numbers in any one block increased at about six or seven percent.

During the cull year, numbers went down by about 15 percent but one year later numbers in this same block increased again by 15 percent.

"Elephants are pregnant for 22 months, so they couldn't achieve that (15 percent growth) through reproduction," explains Van Aarde.

"All that happened there is that the elephants reshuffled themselves within this space.

"So if you were culling to reduce impact, the expected outcome is certainly not what you were driving for. And this shows me that when we design management tools, we have to be rather clever in predicting what the consequences are going to be."

Another example he cites is Etosha National Park in Namibia, where so many artificial water points were established that most animals were never more than 12km from water.

Satellite collars revealed that, during the dry season, elephants spent most of their time within 8km of an artificial water point.

Trees around these points were being destroyed to the extent that 42 percent of Etosha no longer had trees.

"What are the important findings? Elephants kill those trees... but it's not the elephants' mistake, it's the mistake of the chaps who put in those water holes," he suggests.

But equally importantly, rainfall records for Etosha showed that the area had experienced severe drought during the same period.

"So, did those trees die because elephants killed them, because of the drought, because of the managers or because of all three?" Van Aarde asks.

"It's extremely difficult to interpret what elephants do to their environment and what the impact is."

Kruger National Park also has a huge number of artificial water points where similar damage has been reported, although 184 have now been closed, with 141 still open.

Most of the 270 000 elephants in southern Africa live outside the boundaries of official conservation areas, Van Aarde says.

"Only about 20 percent of the distributional range is actually within officially working conservation areas.

"We have a large number of elephant populations, all across southern Africa, all within a natural distribution range, but all relatively isolated from each other."

Botswana and Zimbabwe alone account for about 88 percent of all the elephants, with South Africa having only about 9 percent.

The work he and his group are doing is based on the concepts of "metapopulation" - a collection of populations of a single species like elephants - and "megaparks", which are huge areas big enough to sustain this collection of populations in a natural way.

"Animals are not distributed across the landscape in even numbers, and because the quality of the landscape differs from place to place, the way that animals interact with that quality also differs from place to place," he explains.

There are "sources" which are areas of primary habitat with ideal conditions for feeding and breeding where survival rates of the elephant calves will be high, and "sinks" which are areas less than ideal and where mortality rates will be high.

At different times, influenced by changing climatic conditions and corresponding factors such as plant growth, some of the various populations making up the meta-population will be thriving and others will be in decline.

And not all places suitable for elephants will actually be inhabited by these animals at any given time.

This is what Van Aarde and his colleagues are finding in the seven clusters being studied.

For example, the elephant population in the Etosha cluster is growing at eight percent, while the 120 000 elephants making up the Chobe cluster - the biggest in southern Africa - is declining by one percent a year.

"Now that's quite a surprise to many," says Van Aarde.

"If the populations were all interconnected, the fascinating thing is that on average across the region, you would have stability in numbers, while in a given place numbers would go up and down.

"We have every reason to believe that this could be the solution."

Van Aarde and his colleagues are working on a five-year contract to design linkages within the seven clusters to create megaparks, which coincide to a degree with the proposed transfrontier or peace parks.

The ultimate goal will be to link these megaparks right across southern Africa.

"My point is that if we continue to look at elephants in each of these southern African countries as distinct and separate entities, we will continue to live in a fool's paradise," he says.

"What I'm proposing is that we look at decreasing management intensity and increase the naturalness of the conservation system, where you will go from being completely artificial to natural, from small to large, from isolated to connected, from populations to metapopulations, from small parks to megaparks, from very costly to cost-effective.

"This will provide for the natural limitation on (elephant) populations across the region, it will provide opportunity for local habitats to recover from disruptions, and it will provide Africa with something unique."

There are, of course, people living in all these potential megapark areas, and their future is an an important part of the five-study.

But there are probably fewer people who will be affected than is commonly supposed, Van Aarde suggests.

"Because the reality is that rural Africa is running empty for a variety of reasons, and urban Africa and peri-urban Africa are growing.

"And as far as the interests of people are concerned, experimentally we can fence their interests in and fence elephants out, which is completely the opposite of where we were before."

Decisions on the researchers' recommendations are obviously in the political realm, Van Aarde concedes.

"But there are forces that are jointly taking hands now and working towards this thing.

"Increasingly, I'm seeing African politicians now listening and wanting to be part of it, and I think that will take care of a lot."
Increasingly, Africa is finding solutions to its problems, he adds.

"The one thing we have that no one else has and that we realise we can provide, is elephants and everything that is associated with them. And that's biodiversity.

"Now we know how to speak the elephants' language, we know how to derive what is important for them, now we have technology on our side.

"We would be fools not to uncover unique ways to solve problems of today and tomorrow."