The elephant is dead, but its tusks are still there. Who killed it?

The old elephant Lugard fell.

This male African elephant is a " Big Trust ", and there are only about 20 Big Trust elephants with tusks that are long enough to reach the ground. However, when managers of Kenya's Tsavo National Park found its body on November 21, its proud tusks were still intact - Lujiade did not die at the hands of poachers.

Lujiade's body was found on November 21 | Kenya Wildlife Service KWS

Lujiade is not the first elephant to die mysteriously this year. On November 1, another "tusked elephant" was found in the wilderness - Dida, the old female matriarch of the Tsavo elephant herd. Its body had long been gnawed by scavengers to the point of leaving only bones, but its tusks were also intact .

When the aerial patrol discovered Dida's body, it had been dead for a long time and its skin and flesh had been eaten up, but its proud tusks were intact, which ruled out the possibility that it died from poaching. | Kenya Wildlife Service KWS

In the entire Tsavo National Park, at least 109 wild elephants have died this year, and in Kenya as a whole, the number has reached 205. Analyzing their causes of death, it is found that most wild elephants did not die from poaching, so what killed them?

Drastic swings between drought and flood

The answer is common yet easily overlooked - extreme weather that persists for many years.

The northeastern peninsula of Africa and its adjacent areas are collectively referred to as the " Horn of Africa " ​​(HOA). Kenya also belongs to the Greater Horn of Africa (GHR) in a broad sense. In terms of climate zoning, the Horn of Africa is not a warm place, but it is by no means completely without rainfall. During the rainy seasons from March to May and October to December each year, moist water vapor from the Indian Ocean arrives as scheduled. The precious rainfall maintains the basic ecological operation of the local area and nourishes the reproduction and survival of more than 100 million people in the Greater Horn of Africa.

Lu Jiade's former style｜Kenya Wildlife Service KWS

But in recent years, extreme climate events have occurred frequently, lasted for a long time and had severe impacts. So far in 2018, the Horn of Africa has been swinging wildly between extreme floods and extreme droughts .

In 2018, the Red Sea coast, including the Horn of Africa, suffered two typhoons that hit the coast directly. The unusually heavy rains swept across the desert and grasslands, providing an opportunity for explosive growth of local vegetation. The sudden appearance of a large amount of vegetation caused the local desert locusts to over-breed. The natural shrinkage of vegetation after the rains prompted the locusts to continue to gather, eventually forming a locust plague. The locust plague did not gradually subside until two years later, but by then, agricultural production in the Horn of Africa had been hit hard by both floods and locust plagues , and the local vegetation coverage rate had also shrunk significantly .

Between 2019 and 2020, the vegetation coverage in the Horn of Africa shrank significantly due to the locust plague｜gro-intelligence｜

The Horn of Africa experienced unusually high rainfall in 2018 and 2019, mainly due to the influence of the Indian Ocean El Niño - the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD); after that, the global La Niña phenomenon brought a three-year drought to the region.

In years when La Niña is strong, a large amount of warm air rises in the western Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean and then spreads to the east and west. The Horn of Africa is located right in the middle of the two. Two air currents meet above it, descend, and then spread to the east and west. One of them forms a strong easterly wind and moves toward the Indian Ocean, just blocking the moisture from the Indian Ocean. | NOSS Climate.gov

Since October 2020, the Horn of Africa has experienced five consecutive rainy seasons with a significant decrease in rainfall (some areas have no rainfall at all), which is the most severe drought in nearly 40 years. According to current forecasts, the sixth rainy season, which is expected to arrive in March-May next year, is also unlikely to show signs of improvement .

Animals are the direct victims

Affected by locust plagues and long-term droughts, vegetation in the Horn of Africa has shrunk, water sources have dried up , and survival resources have been sharply reduced, posing a direct threat to the survival of local wild animals.

According to statistics from the Kenya Wildlife Service, in addition to elephants, the deaths of large wild animals recorded this year include at least 512 wildebeests, 12 giraffes, 51 buffaloes, 381 plains zebras and 58 Grevy's zebras . Grevy's zebras are particularly noteworthy, as they are only found in Kenya and Ethiopia, with a total population of only about 2,500 in the wild. That is to say, the loss of Grevy's zebras found in Kenya alone this year has accounted for more than 2% of its population size; and considering that the drought in Ethiopia is more severe than in Kenya, the actual population shrinkage of this species may be even greater.

A Grevy's zebra carcass in Kenya's Samburu National Park. | Baz Ratner/Reuters

According to statistics from August last year to January this year, the number of giraffes killed in Kenya reached at least 215, and about 30 Heinzgeren wildebeests died. The global wild population size of this vigilant herbivore is only between 300 and 500, and the continued drought has the most significant impact on the survival of this species.

Elephants struggling to tap groundwater in a dry riverbed | tsavotrust.org

Rescue work for wild animals was launched almost immediately. In order to provide basic drinking water and food for wild animals, in many protected areas including Tsavo, small dams have been built on rivers that have not yet dried up to retain water; water trucks are constantly running, trying to provide water to animals through small artificial water holes; and pasture grass has also been put on the increasingly declining grasslands to provide a basic food source for herbivores that have difficulty finding food.

Build dams and provide water sources | Kenya Wildlife Service KWS

But Lugard and other giants continue to fall, and limited human intervention is not enough to deal with the current scale of the crisis . Moreover, in addition to the almost irresistible natural disasters, the wildlife in the Horn of Africa is in a more complex crisis.

After all, it is not the wildlife themselves that are experiencing extreme climate stress.

Human-animal conflict under natural disasters

The environment in the Horn of Africa has not always been so harsh. Before the 1990s, the La Nina phenomenon had little impact on the Horn of Africa, the local rainy season was relatively regular, and agriculture in some countries in the Horn of Africa was well developed . Especially Kenya and Ethiopia, in addition to achieving basic food self-sufficiency through grain planting, have also successively developed animal husbandry and horticulture exports to generate income. Thanks to the development of agriculture, the total population of the Greater Horn of Africa has reached 187 million, and Ethiopia has become the second most populous country in Africa with a population of 110 million.

However, under the influence of several consecutive years of extreme climate, the agricultural system in the Horn of Africa, which lacked sufficient infrastructure support, collapsed rapidly , and countries quickly fell from agricultural powers to famine-prone countries.

According to UN statistics, as of early December, a total of 36.4 million people in the Horn of Africa were directly affected by drought, including one-fifth of Ethiopia's population and one-tenth of Kenya's population. Coupled with the direct impact of the situation in Ukraine, the international community's allocation of food relief to the Horn of Africa is also facing challenges , which together have led to at least 23 million people in the region being in a state of severe food insecurity.

Giraffes hunted for bushmeat in Kenya's Taita National Park. Hunger exacerbates conflict between humans and animals. | Scott McLean / CNN

Under such circumstances, conflicts between humans and animals are inevitable. In order to protect their herds, herders drive away wild animals that come to drink water from the only remaining ponds; the decline in habitat quality has prompted predatory animals to venture into human communities to prey on livestock, exacerbating conflicts; in Taita Hill Wildlife Reserve, hungry disaster victims kill giraffes for bushmeat; even those community residents who once worked closely with the reserve and explored a new model of "wildlife tourism + service industry" are facing a sharp deterioration in their attitudes towards wild animals due to the dual impact of the shrinking tourism industry and drought caused by the epidemic.

Such impacts may last for a long time. According to local work experience, it takes about five years for a herder family to fully recover from a severe drought . Due to the lack of income and food sources, the pressure of human-animal conflict always exists during this period. What's more regrettable is that such judgment is based on the premise that the drought can end immediately; but in the Horn of Africa today, the drought is getting worse day by day, and there is no end in sight.

Snares seized in Kenya's Taita National Park | Scott McLean/CNN

The Forgotten Horn of Africa

Ecological imbalance, famine, wildlife conservation... Each of these is a major issue that tests global wisdom when listed separately; when they are entangled together, things become even more difficult. And the difficult situation happened in the Horn of Africa, which has been forgotten on the edge of the world's public opinion stage. It is difficult to attract attention in itself .

The floods, locust plagues and droughts in the Horn of Africa are all caused by increasingly severe climate change. But this is an irony - in previous climate change research, people often focus on habitats such as polar regions, plateaus or coral reefs, and argue endlessly over different emission reduction plans of various countries; no one would have thought that the residents of the Horn of Africa, who account for less than 0.1% of the world's total carbon emissions, and the East African wild animals that have lived here for generations, would be the first group to face the climate change crisis.

Giraffes in Nairobi National Park, Kenya | GTBacchus / Wikimedia Commons

The catastrophe spreading in the Horn of Africa shows us how complex, urgent and serious the problem of climate change is, and how vulnerable we are when it suddenly strikes. It is still unclear whether the people and animals in the Horn of Africa can finally escape this catastrophe, but if we do not take immediate action, where will the next "Horn of Africa" ​​be? This may be a question worth pondering.

Author: A man is wandering

Editor: Mai Mai

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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