Kevin Scott
In survival terms, the elephants of the Greater Addo Elephant National Park are booming. The Addo elephants have increased their population thirtyfold in just 71 years.
But increasing a population so drastically has its dangers not only to the ecology of the park but also to the biology of the animals. Today inbreeding is one of the most serious threats facing the Addo elephants.
Help, however, has come from Dr Anna Whitehouse, an elephant researcher and geneticist with two degrees from Cambridge.
Whitehouse is a consultant for the International Fund for Animal Welfare and is leading the way in investigating genetic bottlenecks in the closed populations of the park’s elephants.
“There’s no visible signs of inbreeding, but there are potential dangers in a loss of genetic diversity,” says Whitehouse. These start out internally, she says. As the gene pool is reduced a range of possible health dangers occur.
“Elephants may become susceptible to disease, for example.” she says, “and a whole population may be wiped out because they lack the diversity and resistance to fight it.
“Basically we’re studying the genetic health of the population,” says Whitehouse.
The park is known for having the fastest growing herd in South Africa, quite a feat for a reserve founded in 1931 with just 11 elephants.
Today more than 340 elephants roam and feed on the dense Eastern Cape bushveld and enjoy a healthy growth rate of 5,5% a year.
Whitehouse has been concentrating on the elephants of Addo for years, during which she earned a PhD from the University of Port Elizabeth for her study of them as a “small, closed population”.
Distinctiveness is important to her: “My research is based on knowing each and every elephant individually,” she says. This intimate knowledge of behaviour is essential because “it provides an invaluable foundation for a detailed examination of the population”.
Whitehouse has successfully mapped the entire Addo elephant family tree a reconstruction that proved no easy feat.
“We reconstructed the whole population from the original 11. It was over 400 elephants in total,” she says.
Whitehouse had to track individual elephants in more than 8 600 photos that flooded her office after appeals to the public to send in old images of the park’s elephants.
“The earliest one we received was from 1934,” she says.
Photographs are like fingerprints in identifying elephants, she says, “as each elephant is easily recognisable through the unique wrinkles and blood vessel patterns in the ears”.
Radio tracking has also given Whitehouse a clear picture of movement patterns within the park, an important factor in the future of sustainable ecosystems.
The result is a 70-year data set now being demographically analysed.
“This information adds to the understanding of the population,” she says.
“We’ll look at aspects of their growth rate, their mortality rate that sort of thing.”
Whitehouse’s methods are rare and there is only one other project in the Amboseli in Kenya, researching a whole elephant population.
“There are studies where researchers get to know elephants, but not as a whole population,” she says.
And if Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Valli Moosa has anything to say about the elephants, it will probably be in praise of them one two-year-old is named after his grandmother, Fatima.
“The minister was really impressed,” says Whitehouse. Due to the park’s system of tracking the elephants and their family groups, the baby animal had to be given a name that began with an F. The youngster’s mother, Bivinia, was in the B to G group and her offspring belonged to the F group family, says Whitehouse.
“I remembered my late grandmother and named the baby Fatima,” Moosa told the media.
One of the elephants Whitehouse mapped was Hapoor, a legend in the park who managed to hold a position of dominance for nearly 20 years and died in 1968 when he was shot after the first, and so far only, successful escape over the “elephant-proof” boundary fence.
“Hapoor’s infamous bad temper may have resulted from his experiences of man outside the park: farmers often retaliated against the giant trespassers on their property and many of Hapoor’s associates were killed as a result,” she writes.
Today, with the rapid expansion of the park and with the help of Whitehouse and her colleagues, history should not be repeating itself.
Dr Anna Whitehouse will talk on conserving Addo’s elephants past present and future of the population on March 19 at the Monument Olive Schreiner Hall