NCSU grad works to gain endangered status for African elephants

Long before I enrolled in the zoology program at N.C. State, traveled to Africa to study elephants and helped form a local chapter of Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program in Raleigh, I’d developed a deep compassion for Africa’s struggling elephant populations.

But my time at NCSU, and the school’s study-abroad program in Namibia, gave firm shape to my childhood passion, leaving no doubt in my mind that there was so much more we could do here in this country to protect elephants from the escalating ivory trade that was fueling the deaths of tens of thousands of elephants every year at the hands of poachers.

Still, it might be hard for some people to understand how the news of a single elephant’s death thousands of miles away in Kenya could leave me sobbing at my desk.

But this wasn’t just any elephant – he was widely considered to be the world’s largest, a magnificent beast with tusks so long they swept the ground.

And this was personal.

It was a year ago this month I first got word that poachers had killed the 45-year-old elephant known to Kenyans as Satao, (SAY-tow). I had only recently returned from the Kenyan village of Mwakoma where for four months I helped build a research center and worked with local farmers to maintain bee-hive fences used to scare elephants away from their crops.

My first day there as an intern in the Nairobi office of Save The Elephants, staffers pointed out a framed portrait of an unbelievably enormous elephant. It was Satao. And in short time I would be working just outside the Tsavo East National Park he called home. I was determined to see him with my own eyes.

The workdays were long and tiring. Still, every chance I got I went in search of elephant families, observing their habits, learning to recognize different individuals and cheering when they avoided the beehive fences.

But evidence that poachers were always on the prowl was never far away. And each new media report of massive elephant kills made it clear we needed to find a way to increase protections for them.

When I returned from Africa to a job as a conservation biologist in Portland, Oregon, I started assessing the benefits of increasing protections for elephants under the Endangered Species Act.

Protecting elephants as “endangered” instead of the current “threatened” status would strengthen prohibitions on ivory trade in the U.S., an important step in reducing the poaching deaths that now average nearly 100 a day.

During my research I discovered the latest studies had confirmed what many researchers had believed for years: African elephants are comprised of two distinct species – forest elephants and savannah elephants. Recent genetic research leaves no doubt African elephants split into two separate species at least 2 million years ago, about the same time Asian elephants diverged from mammoths.

As their names suggest, forest elephants and savannah elephants evolved in different ecosystems, with forest elephants concentrated in the rainforests of Central and West Africa, and savannah elephants, which are larger, generally occurring in more open terrain throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

With the constant pressure from ongoing habitat loss and poaching, there are likely only about 400,000 savannah elephants and 100,000 forest elephants remaining. And with both species experiencing steep population declines – including a 65 percent decrease in forest elephants – it’s clear they need to be recognized as separate species and that both need “endangered” status.

This month I submitted a legal petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking the agency to do just that.

My experience in Africa taught me that we’ve got to act while we still can.

Toward the end of my time in Kenya, I made the last of several trips into the park hoping for glimpse of the great Satao. It wasn’t to be.

As fate would have it, the day after I departed, my project leader spotted him and snapped a photo.

A framed copy of that photo now hangs above my desk – a perpetual reminder that if we put off until tomorrow the hard work of conserving our most imperiled species we risk letting the opportunity slip through our fingers forever.

This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 3:00 PM with the headline "NCSU grad works to gain endangered status for African elephants."