36 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
“ Last year in Sri
Lanka, more than
300 elephants
were killed in
altercations
with humans”
Plan bee
producing just one calf every six years. Earlier
this year, based on mathematical modelling
of elephant population demographics from
Udawalawe, de Silva reported that for Asian
elephants to maintain their numbers, females
must reproduce at near-optimal rates and
most calves must survive. Nutritional stress,
in other words, can quickly push elephant
populations in Sri Lanka and beyond into
tailspins. “For elephants, the biggest threat
is the calf that’s never born,” says de Silva.
The stark implications of this finding
were reinforced earlier this year, when
Fernando and his colleagues published the
first nationwide elephant survey. It showed
that elephants occur across 60 per cent of the
country – virtually everywhere that isn’t highly
urbanised – and that 70 per cent of them live
side-by-side with humans. This not only
means that Sri Lanka’s attempt to confine
elephants to parks has “completely failed”,
says Fernando, but also that non-protected
areas will have to play a critical role in the
species’ survival. If Sri Lanka wants to save
its elephants, it has to find a way for people
to live peacefully alongside them.
I saw just how difficult this is when I came
across a bloated bull elephant lying in a ditch
by the side of a dirt road in north-west Sri
Lanka, flies buzzing around two bullet wounds.
A local man guessed it had been shot by a
farmer in a nearby field and ran away before
collapsing here. The animal was still alive
when it was discovered and a small crowd had
gathered and erected a makeshift tent to give it
some shade. Someone brought coconuts and
bananas to try to feed it. Someone else brought
water. Another person called the vet. When the
elephant died, a monk performed a ceremony
to help ease it into the next life.
I left the scene feeling nauseous. But just a
few minutes drive away, past neon green rice
paddies and homes shaded by coconut and
banana trees, I visited a place that is showing
by example that there is an alternative.
In 2013, the village of Galewewa pioneered
a programme designed by Fernando and his
colleagues to use electric fences to encircle
crops and homes rather than elephants. The
locals took some convincing. “People just
assumed it wouldn’t be successful because
they’d seen the government fences,” says
Sampath Ekanayaka, manager of the Centre
for Conservation and Research’s community
programmes in the region. “To them, this
was just another fence.”
In many ways, it is. But there are reasons to
think the scheme would work. Elephants that
encounter fences in national parks have “allout soon after arriving at a park. The only ones
that stick around are the females and calves,
which tend to be more risk averse. They soon
experience first-hand that Sri Lanka’s parks
often lack the resources necessary to support
hundreds of additional residents, each of
which eats up to 140 kilograms of vegetation
per day. The newcomers quickly become
“emaciated, walking skeletons, and many
starve to death”, says Fernando. “We’ve seen
this over and over again wherever elephants
have been driven to parks and fenced in.”
I saw it for myself at Udawalawe National
Park. Tourists raised their cameras as a mother
and calf stepped out of the thick brush, but the
elephants were a disturbing sight, with jutting
ribs, protruding shoulder blades and rope-like
backbones. They plucked placidly at the short
grass beneath their feet, but it clearly isn’t
enough to sustain them. Like many elephants
confined to overcrowded national parks, they
were on the verge of starvation.
That females and calves tend to suffer this
fate is especially concerning, says Shermin
de Silva, director of the Udawalawe Elephant
Research Project and founder of Trunks &
Leaves, a non-profit organisation focusing
on elephant research and outreach. Elephants
have extremely slow reproduction rates, usuallyIn Kenya, folklore suggests
elephants are terrified of bees.
Lucy King, a zoologist at the
University of Oxford, spent the
best part of a decade exploring
the scientific validity of that belief.
“It turns out that, like most decent
folklore, there’s a lot of truth in it,”
she says. Merely the sound of bees
sends elephants running – a
finding that could help reduce
human-elephant conflict.
King has since designed
elephant-deterring beehive fences.
With 15 beehives and 15 dummy
hives strung along a 300-metre
wire, the fences are elevated so that
people and cattle can pass safely
beneath. But if an elephant tries
to push through, the wire swings,
triggering a flurry of buzzing wingsand stings. King’s studies suggest
the bees are an effective deterrent.
The fences reduce crop raids by 80
per cent, on average, which explains
why they have now been installed
at 62 sites in 20 countries.
King is currently experimenting
with introducing the concept in
Sri Lanka, where human-elephant
conflict is particularly intense. She
found that Indian bees are more
placid than African ones, reducing
the effectiveness of the fences.
But beehive fencing could still be
a worthy investment for Sri Lankan
farmers, who would enjoy a
reduction in elephant raids, ensure
their crops are well pollinated and
get honey to sell. As King says:
“This is the only fence that, once
you build it, makes money for you.”