ASIAN ELEPHANTS - ENVIRONMENT
News: Endangered
Asian elephant has lost most of its optimal habitat in Nilgiri Reserve: Study
What's in the news?
● Elephants
winding their way up the rocky green hills in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve
(NBR) make for pretty photographs. But a recent article says the endangered
Asian Elephant has lost most of its “optimal” habitat: flat terrain that is
easily negotiable.
Key takeaways:
● The
Western Ghats is an escarpment running north–south along the western coastline
of India, interrupted towards the south by the low-lying Palghat Gap that
separates the northern from the southern elephant populations.
● This
gap has been transformed by agriculture for several centuries, is 3 km at its
narrowest, and 40 km at its widest.
● The
northern part of the Western Ghats includes the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve and its surrounding protected areas,
which contain the largest remaining
population of wild elephants, 6000 animals.
Factors restricting elephant movements:
● Crop
cultivation
● Human
settlements.
These
two factors hindered the movements of elephants and keeping them confined to
the hilly areas, considered sub-optimal
habitats.
Consequences of sub-optimal habitats:
● Lowering their chances of
survival due to dangerous terrain for animals of
this size.
● More in-breeding and low
genetic diversity - increasing chances of
disease, and lowering fertility rates.
Asian Elephants:
● It
is distributed throughout the Indian
subcontinent and Southeast Asia, from India in the west, Nepal in the
north, Sumatra in the south, and to Borneo in the east.
● Elephants
are keystone species.
● The Asian elephant is the
largest living land animal in Asia.
Habitat:
● In
India, the Asian elephant is found in four
fragmented populations, in the south, north, central and north-east of India.
● Their
habitat ranges from wet tropical evergreen forests to semi-arid thorn and scrub
forests. However, the highest densities of the elephant population are found in
tropical deciduous forests.
Significance:
● Asian
elephants are extremely sociable,
forming groups of six to seven related females that are led by the oldest
female, the matriarch.
Subspecies:
There
are three subspecies of Asian
elephants such as
● Indian
● Sumatran
and
● Sri
Lankan.
The
Indian has the widest range and accounts for the majority of the remaining
elephants on the continent.
India’s Initiatives for Conservation of Elephants:
● Gaj Yatra:
A nationwide campaign to protect elephants, was launched on the occasion of
World Elephant Day in 2017.
● Project Elephant:
It is a centrally sponsored scheme which was launched in 1992.