Mortality Patterns of Asian Elephants in a Region of Human–Elephant Conflict

Abstract

Many wildlife species suffer from human-wildlife conflict, especially crop-raiding. Long-term analyses of mortality patterns are needed to assess the efficacy of management strategies that address this issue. We report mortality patterns from necropsies of 498 Asian elephants from 2009-2018 in an area of northwestern Sri Lanka. Deaths were lowest in July and highest in October, a period of peak crop availability. Most (about 70%) deaths were human-related, and males were killed in these incidents more frequently than females. As gunshot deaths decreased, other forms of human-related deaths increased. Additionally, causes of death differed between districts, with more intentional human-related mortality observed in the district with the highest percent of protected land. These results highlight the importance of understanding the long-term spatial and temporal variation in wildlife mortality to effectively address human-wildlife conflict.

Strategies of protected area use by Asian elephants in relation to motivational state and social affiliations

“…Human proximity decreases foraging efficiency, as it necessitates avoidance of human activities within remaining rangelands and habitat edges 26 , 66 . Failure to do so can lead to negative interactions with people 25 , 67 , 68 . Rathnayake et al 25 document that 98% of conflict incidents with elephant in Sri Lanka take place within 1 km of a recent land-use conversion.…”

Planning for Human-Wildlife Coexistence: Conceptual Framework, Workshop Process, and a Model for Transdisciplinary Collaboration

“…The wildlife and human axis combined define four archetypical representations (Fischer et al, 2017;Hartel et al, 2018) that cover all possible HWIs: (i) negative for both wildlife and people (left lower quadrant), like when endangered wildlife causes damage to people and preventive or retaliatory killing or harassment ensues (e.g., Das and Jana, 2018;LaDue et al, 2021;Simpfendorfer et al, 2021); (ii) negative for wildlife and positive for (some) people (left upper quadrant), as in overharvest associated with poaching or wildlife trade (e.g., Shepherd et al, 2017;Gomez et al, 2020); (iii) positive for wildlife (at the population level) and negative for people (right lower quadrant), as when abundant wildlife is a nuisance (e.g., Gamalo et al, 2019;Carpio et al, 2021); vehicle collisions and zoonotic diseases produce negative outcomes to people and are associated with both endangered and abundant wildlife (e.g., Pagany, 2020;Namusisi et al, 2021), therefore they belong in the two lower quadrants; and (iv) positive for both wildlife and people (right upper quadrant), like when abundant, native or exotic wildlife, is used in tourism (e.g., Macdonald et al, 2017) or sustainable harvest (e.g., Campos-Silva et al, 2017) (both, but most obviously the latter, may only apply to population-level parameters and not to individual-level).…”

Musth and sexual selection in elephants: a review of signalling properties and potential fitness consequences

“…Presumably, males that grow faster and/or larger are at an advantage when they reach sexual maturity, as entering the state of musth is dependent upon overall body condition, especially at older ages (Shannon et al, 2006b;Taylor et al, 2019). This early investment in male offspring may be especially important because mortality risk may be higher during early adulthood in males compared to females (Moss, 2001;Gough & Kerley, 2006;Wittemyer et al, 2013;LaDue et al, 2021); even though females start reproducing at younger ages and experience higher survival as a result of living in groups, males are probably capable of producing many more offspring if they survive to peak sexual maturity and continue reproducing through their lives.…”