How can we improve elephant management?

  Elephants are one of the most recognizable animals in the world.  Sadly, both the African and Asian elephant are under threat of extinction.  Such large animals need vast areas to roam in order to feed themselves and this often brings them into deadly conflict with humans wanting to use the space for their own needs.  The other deadly threat to elephants is the demand for the ivory of their tusks.  To facilitate elephant conservation our research focuses on both the reproductive physiology of these impressive animals as well as their stress responses to different management protocols both in the wild and in captivity.

  The Asian elephant is in danger of extinction within the next 50 years due to habitat loss in the wild and limited breeding success in captivity.  One of the greatest challenges to successful breeding in captivity is that most captive facilities are not equipped to safely house large, potentially aggressive, bull elephants.  And, as with any mammal, it takes both sexes to make a baby.  Captive management of Asian elephants could be greatly enhanced by the development of assisted reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination and sperm cryopreservation.  The use of artificial insemination in conjunction with sperm cryopreservation would mean that facilities that can’t house bulls could still have their females produce calves and contribute to the genetic diversity of the captive population.  Until now, expensive and cumbersome equipment was viewed as necessary to successfully cryopreserve sperm but we recently developed a field-friendly method of cryopreserving Asian elephant sperm using relatively inexpensive equipment that is easily transported.  Fellow biologists are now using our technique to cryopreserve sperm from big tuskers in Africa that are heavily targeted by poachers and big game hunters.  

  Sperm cryopreservation is not the only tool we developed in captive elephants that is being used to facilitate conservation of wild populations.  We are currently using fecal hormone analyses developed in zoo animals to monitor the stress response of wild African elephants under different management protocols.  We are teaming up with field biologists in Kenya and South Africa to monitor elephant populations that are subjected to poaching and big game hunting and to compare those stressors to other stressors encountered by wild elephants such as drought, fires and starvation.  We hope that the results will be used by authorities to inform their policies for managing wild elephant populations.

elephant sperm stained with Spermac