 "Photo: Courtesy of: http://oz.ensbell.net")
Using satellite technology, a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts track elephants across regions of conflict across Africa through the newly-founded nonprofit organization Elephants Without Borders.
By attaching global positioning units on the African elephants, Curtice Griffin, a professor in the department of natural resources conservation, and his team of graduate students have followed the animals as they move across national borders on the path of their seasonal migrations, from Botswana to Zimbabwe and into Angola.
Griffin hopes the knowledge gained will decrease potential conflicts between the elephants and local inhabitants. According to Griffin, human interaction has left elephant populations in some African countries devastated.
"The problem of human-elephant conflict is worse in Tanzania," Griffin said. "There are more people and farms. Elephants compete for water with Maasai cattle in the dry shrub lands and raid large farms on the western slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro."
According to Griffin, the situation for the animals in Angola remains direr after 25 years of civil conflict have left elephant populations "decimated."
Griffin, along with two graduate students Alfred Kikoti and Mike Chase, has presented the research to national governments and area villages in the hopes that communities will keep ancestral elephant migration paths open and free of human development.
"Although having elephants near your village can be risky, they bring in tourists who bring in revenue," said Griffin. "This is especially important in arid regions where there are few other sources of income. When communities realize they can earn money from tourists coming to see the elephants, they are much less likely to harm them when conflict occurs."
Griffin and his team collar the large animals by darting them with tranquilizers from a helicopter, a process which he describes as dangerous.
"We usually dart the matriarch, the old female herd leader," said Griffin. "If she is down, the rest of the herd stays away while we put on the collar. If we dart another herd member, the matriarch will sometimes circle back and try to kill us."
According to Griffin, bull elephants, unless darted during a period of heightened breeding conditions - called mutsh - are less likely to put members of the team into harm's way while being collared.
The GPS technology allows Griffin to track the herds as they make their way across Africa from his office in Massachusetts. His team has collared as many as 50 elephants in Botswana and an additional 20 in northern Tanzania.
"Elephants aren't staying in the parks," said Griffin. "We have followed them from Botswana into Zimbabwe and Zambia, and they are moving across the Caprivi Strip of Namibia into Angola."
Griffin regularly travels to Africa with UMass students and plans to return to Africa in the summer of 2008 for an 18-day safari.
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