The grub is better there
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAt first sight, it looks as though Asian elephants did not get the memo. They seem to travel outside protected areas with gay abandon. But a study by Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, in Yunnan province, China, and Benoit Goossens of Danau Girang Field Centre, in Sabah, Malaysia, suggests that this abandon is not quite as gay as it seems.
Dr Campos-Arceiz, Dr Goossens and their colleagues synthesised the work of three research groups who were following in Dr Douglas-Hamilton’s footsteps by tracking their quarry with. Collectively, these groups studied, over the course of more than a decade, 102 elephants in both west and east Malaysia. Altogether, they recorded more than 600,000, they found that these elephants, though concentrated in Malaysia’s protected areas, spent more than half of their time outside them.
Which is not to say that the protected areas offered no protection. Most forays went less than 3km from those areas. Home ranges, by contrast, were measured in hundreds, or thousands, of square kilometres. The upshot is that Dr Campos-Arceiz and Dr Goossens suggest a change in conservation policy to recognise the value of these areas of secondary growth, which are often neglected because of an understandable desire to preserve what primary forest is left.
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