A hungry elephant
is caught by an infra-
red camera raiding
a patch of spinach
and sorrel in Pascal
Mam bwete’s backyard
garden near the park.
As settlements expand
into areas traversed by
elephants, the gardens
are a tempting source
of needed nutrition.the elephants’ diet. One morning, I accompanied
two field researchers in search of elephant dung.
We didn’t have to drive far before coming upon
a fresh brownish-green, bucket-size pile beside
the road. After slipping on rubber gloves, one
of the researchers counted the number of lumps
and then determined the circumference of each
with a tape measure.
The reason behind collecting such detail,
he explained somewhat abashedly, was to
document how much dung the elephants were
producing—over time, these data would reveal
how much they were eating.
After collecting the dung in a plastic bag, we
drove to a stream. The researchers emptied thecase of tiny digital camera tapes. I had no way
to play them.”
Whytock’s mother found a camcorder in her
attic. From White’s tapes and other sources,
Whytock was able to compile a database of
thousands of elephant photos. He found that,
on average, the body condition of forest ele-
phants—scored by such criteria as how bony the
animals looked—had declined by a pronounced
11 percent from 2008 to 2018. The scarcity of fruit
in Lopé was the likeliest explanation. “Fruits and
seeds are the highest calorie food in the elephant
diet,” Bush says.
One way Lopé’s elephants try to make up for
the fruit shortage is by raiding people’s gardens
in the middle of the night. Jean-Charles Adigou,
whose house was on the edge of the park in a
settlement of a few dozen homes, told me he
often was woken up by elephants visiting his
backyard, where bananas and plantains grew.
To scare them away, Adigou and his neighbors
would make as much noise as they could. But
frequently it was too late, he said. A herd of six
elephants can destroy a backyard plantation in
minutes. “When I was young, this didn’t hap-
pen,” he said. “Elephants stayed far away from
the village.”
Another resident in the settlement, a fisher-
man named Vincent Bossissi, was expecting
the worst. I talked to him as he sat on a plas-
tic chair under a mango tree in his backyard,
where he also grows corn. When I asked him
about elephants, he turned grim and looked
away. Mangoes were especially attractive to
the animals, he said. He fully expected them
to visit one of these nights and strip his mango
tree of all its fruit. This explained the row of
ripe mangoes on a table beside him. As the con-
versation went on, I watched him eat one after
another, apparently to preempt any losses from
a nighttime raid.
Though Bossissi wasn’t enthused about ele-
phants, Brigitte Moussavou, one of his neigh-
bors, told me that many in the community were
aware that elephants enable the regeneration
of certain tree species, including the greatly
valued moabi tree, whose seeds are used for
cooking oil.
“We want to protect our crops,” she said, “but
we are not against elephants.”
AT LOPÉ NATIONAL PARK, scientists now are
investigating whether climate change is altering
118 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC