Credit: lanky_larry

Asha the baby elephant from the Dublin zoo.

A female African elephant calf born at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park late this summer has been named Phakamile, which means “noble” in the African language of siSwati, zoo officials announced Monday.

The calf was born Sept. 19 to 17-year-old Umoya, becoming the third pachyderm born at the Wild Animal Park over the previous 12 months.

Park officials said the young elephant is doing well, learning her way around the African elephant yard and staying close to her mom.

Umoya, which means “spirit” in siSwati, was part of a herd rescued from culling at a Swaziland national park and brought to the 1,800-acre Wild Animal Park in 2003.

Members of an elephant family may be out of sight but they are always in the minds of the herd’s matriarchs, reseachers have found.

Tests have found that female elephants are able to remember the whereabouts of at least 17 family members simultaneously and perhaps as many as 30. They can keep mental tabs on which of their relations are ahead of them when the herd searches for food, which of them are lagging behind and which are travelling in separate groups.

Professor Richard Byrne, of the University of St Andrews, said that the elephants performed an impressive feat of memory by being able to recall where each of their relatives was in a constantly changing environment. “It’s hard enough for us to keep track of two or three children in a busy shopping centre. Imagine trying to do it with 30 or so,” he said.

Researchers tested the ability of African elephants to remember where each family member had got to by watching their behaviour while sniffing urine. Elephants have poor eyesight but an excellent sense of smell and are able to identify one another from traces of urine on the ground.

To test the memories of the elephants samples of urine-soaked earth were collected by researchers and placed in positions where a herd was about to pass. Observations showed that the animals exhibited surprise when they could detect the odour of a family member they knew was behind them. Interest was shown when the urine was that of a close relative travelling in the same group or in a separate herd, but samples left by unknown individuals were ignored.

Professor Byrne said that the study cast light on the way that elephants used their memories, especially as powers of long-term recall were likely to be of limited use to them.

Anecdotal evidence has suggested that elephants have good long-term memories but the study, in the Amboseli National Park, in Kenya, suggested that the ability to remember where a female relative could be found was much more important to them.

“Very long-term memory may not be all that important to animals except on rare occasions,” Professor Byrne said. “But keeping track of a constantly changing situation would be.

“Elephants are keeping track of whether a member of the family is in the group they are in and whether they are in front or behind. That’s quite a challenge for any of us when you are talking about 20 to 30 individuals.”

The experiments were carried out by researchers from the University of St Andrews and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya. More than 1,400 elephants from eight clans live in the park, in 58 family units.

The researchers, who reported their findings in the journal Biology Letters, concluded: “It seems that female elephants have a general interest in monitoring family members with whom they are travelling. Elephants’ order of travelling often changes and ‘overtaking’ is common, suggesting that elephants must frequently update their expectation of where others are in relation to themselves.

“As a highly social species, elephants would benefit from knowing which individuals were near by.”

Tina and Studla will be given some time to bond with their newborn - a 247-pound female African elephant - before visitors to the Montgomery Zoo view them outdoors.

The newborn arrived Friday and has not yet been given a name, zoo spokeswoman Sarah McKemey said Sunday. She said the community will be involved in naming her.

She said Tina has been living at the 40-acre zoo for two years and Studla - an African name for stout - is on loan from Lowry Park in Tampa, Fla.

McKemey said Tina had a natural delivery without complications.

“Mom and baby seem to be doing wonderful,” she said. “This is our first elephant birth.”

A veterinarian is close if case a problem occurs, she said.

McKemey said visitors to the zoo can view the newborn through window glass.

“But they’re going to wait until mom and baby bond, then introduce her to other elephants, before going outside,” she said.

The zoo has three female elephants including Tina, who is 23 years old.

The zoo’s elephant facility opened on Nov. 11, 2005 with the goal of becoming a breeding center.

Deputy zoo director Marsha Woodard said the newborn was only the third African elephant born in the United States this year. It will start a new bloodline of African elephants in the U.S., Woodard said, because his father, Studla, came directly from Africa.

India - A troupe of trained Indian elephants has taken up drama to save their brethren in the wild, performing tear-jerking plays with elaborate death scenes to arouse the sympathy of villagers.

The conservation officials behind the performances hope to defuse a low-level war between dwindling numbers of endangered elephants and growing numbers of humans.

Villagers are increasingly encroaching on forest land, while elephants are increasingly barging into villages, killing dozens of people each year, often by trampling on them.

The villagers’ tactics involve building makeshift electric fences from electric pylons around villages, which electrocute elephants on contact. A dozen elephants have been killed in this way in eastern India so far this year, conservationists say.

“The objective of using trained elephants to enact electrocution scenes is to evoke sympathy for their wild friends,” said Manindra Biswas, an official from the Forest Department of West Bengal state.

The play opens with six elephants looking tense after hearing gunfire. One elephant walks up to a prop wire, touches it, and crumples into a heap. This starring role is often played by an especially talented elephant-actor called Mainak.

The five elephant friends desperately try to revive their fallen comrade. In the final act, the elephants realize all is lost, salute their dead friend, and walk away. Humans are on hand to narrate the moral of the story.

Hundreds of villagers have enjoyed the free, half-hour-long play since the run began last month, Biswas said, although it is too soon to know how much of a difference the play will make.

“The elephant play is something unique, but there needs to be a more concerted effort to save the elephants which is surely lacking now,” said Shakti Ranjan Banerjee of the New Delhi-based Wildlife Protection Society of India.

About 50,000 wild Asian elephants lived in India a century ago. That number had dropped to around 21,300 elephants in India’s reserves in 2005, according to the environment ministry, although numbers have been rising in some areas.

Much of the decline comes as elephants’ forest habitats are destroyed to make way for agriculture, homes and infrastructure, although illegal poaching for ivory still continues.

Only about 120,000 square km (46,340 square miles) of India’s landmass — less than four percent of the total — is suitable for elephants, according to a survey by the environment ministry last year.

Alaska’s only elephant is getting a one-way ticket out of town Thursday, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.

After a dispute that lasted months between those wanting Maggie to stay at The Alaska Zoo and those advocating for a warmer climate, the 25-year-old African elephant is heading to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Andreas, Calif.

The Air Force agreed to transport Maggie as part of a training mission after officials with PAWS and the zoo found out the elephant was too big for a commercial airline.

Maggie will be loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane at Elmendorf Air Force Base Thursday evening and brought to Travis Air Force Base, where she will be trucked 85 miles to her new home. She will be accompanied by two veterinarians, two transport specialist, an animal behavior specialist and several zoo staff, as well as Ed Stewart, the co-founder of PAWS.

At the sanctuary, Maggie will have 30 acres where she will live with nine other elephants.

Maggie arrived at the Anchorage zoo as a baby in 1983 after her herd was culled in South Africa. She lives as the sole occupant in the zoo’s elephant house with concrete floors and a small outside enclosure.

The Zoo board initially balked at sending Maggie to another facility. With pressure mounting to do better by the elephant, the zoo embarked on an expensive campaign to improve her quality of life, including building a $100,000 treadmill Maggie couldn’t be coaxed into using.

Pleas to have her moved grew louder this year when Maggie twice couldn’t get back on her feet. Firefighters were called to hoist the 8,000-pound animal into a standing position.

The move became reality after retired game show host Bob Barker promised to donate $750,000 for her care.

Greg Carpenter, 43, said he used to come to the zoo as a kid to see Annabelle, its first elephant. While it’s hard to see Maggie go, Carpenter thinks it is right. He tells 5-year-old boy Garrett that Maggie deserves to be warm and have friends.

“I think it is probably a good thing,” Carpenter said. “She’s probably a lonely animal.”

The North Carolina Zoo has received three more African elephants, bringing its total to seven.

The three elephants — Artie, Tonga and Batir — traveled to Asheboro via truck from Riddle’s Elephant and Wildlife Sanctuary, an elephant facility near Greenbrier, Ark.

The move was part of the zoo’s goal to promote long-term preservation of elephants and its elephant breeding program. The three new arrivals are now in a $2.5 million, 12,000-square-foot elephant holding barn within the “Watani Grasslands Reserve.” The zoo also expanded its outdoor elephant enclosure to seven acres for the new animals.

The upgrades are part of an $8.5 million renovation and expansion of the zoo’s elephant and rhinoceros facilities. Since November 2006, the Watani Grasslands Reserve project has raised $7.5 million in private contributions through the N.C. Zoological Society. The reserve’s grand opening is scheduled for April.

Zoe got a good deal.

The Kansas City Zoo’s newest addition to its pachyderm pack arrived by truck Tuesday from a small zoo in Waco, Texas. Here she will inhabit one of the largest elephant yards in the country.

“It’s like coming to an elephant penthouse,” said Scott McCall, manager of the elephant staff.

Zoe, 22, was exploring a pen outside the elephant barn Thursday.

She knows how to paint with her trunk.

“She’s a quick elephant, very smart,” McCall said.

A project for the manufacture of handmade paper from elephant dung in north Bengal’s Cooch Behar forest division is at an advanced stage of completion, the required infrastructure is being put in place and the process of imparting training to the staff is underway.

It would be the first of its kind in the country, Raman Sukumar, Professor, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and an internationally acclaimed expert on elephants, told The Hindu on Thursday.

The project would not only solve the problem of waste disposal but would also provide alternative earning opportunities to villagers. The raw material would be collected from the waste of captive elephants in the sanctuary, M.C. Biswas, Divisional Forest Officer, Cooch Behar, said. Presently, there are 59 such elephants there.

A feasibility study for setting up a similar project in the vicinity of the Gorumara National Park is on for which technological know-how has been sought from World Wildlife Fund’s [WWF] offices in South Africa, WWF’s senior programme coordinator, Sikkim and north Bengal, Dipankar Ghosh added.

There are 13 captive elephants at Gorumara, according to Tapas Das, Divisional Forest Officer (Wildlife II), Jalpaiguri. “Disposal of the waste of these elephants was a major problem particularly as the dung is not decomposable,” Mr. Biswas said.

“On learning of projects taken up in Thailand and Japan, where elephant dung is being converted into pulp and manufacture of hand-made paper, we took up the matter with the authorities at the National Handmade Paper Institute, Jaipur, and got an encouraging response regarding the feasibility of such a project,” he said.

The 46th elephant cub born in Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka recently was ceremoniously named today as Vidula.

The elephant cub received the name after a children’s radio channel initiated by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) recently.

The elephant cub got the name Vidula on the request of the pioneer of the radio channel, Sunil Sarath Perera, the Director General of SLBC.

Vidula was born to Sapumalee last week.

He is the 82nd member of the elephant family in captivity at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage.