AMBOSELI ELEPHANT RESEARCH PROJECT
Saturday, September 16, 2000
Cynthia Moss
It’s been a busy time for the Project since my brief report on the birth of
Echo’s calf, which occurred on August 3. I flew down to Amboseli to see the
new calf and take her picture when she was five days old. On August 15, I went
off to a ranch in the north of Kenya to hold a three-week writing retreat for
all the scientists who have worked on the Project over the years. (See the
photos of the participants I sent last week.) The retreat ended on September 6.
Now I’m back in Amboseli again and I’m happy to report that Echo’s calf is
doing well. At six weeks old she’s strong and active and continues to be very
independent and adventurous. I’ve taken some more photos of her and have
included one in this report.
The webmaster and I both had the idea independently that it might be fun to
have an auction for the right to name Echo’s new calf. We’ll keep you posted
about this possibility.
Since returning to Amboseli on September 12, we’ve had an action-packed
time. Norah Njiraini, AERP’s training coordinator was giving a 10-day course
for elephant researchers. I managed to make it for the last four days. We had
been holding these courses informally for several years but three years ago we
started a more formal version. The course is only open to citizens of African
countries. We take two at a time and they come for 10 days of training basically
to learn our methods of studying elephants. The two students who have just
completed the course were Maiway Luo from Liberia and Zainabu Salim Kenya. (See
photo) We’ve also had students from Uganda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South
Africa, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Most of these ex-trainees are now carrying out
research projects on elephants in their own countries.
Here is a photo of the recent trainees, on the left is Zainabu Salim from
Kenya; she works for Kenya Wildlife Service at Tsavo National Park; on the right
is Maiway Luo from Liberia; he works for the forestry department in his country.
No sooner had the students left when a television crew arrived to film the
research team on September 15 and 16 for Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen TV, which is a
two-hour cable program. We were all filmed working with the elephants and we
were interviewed as well. I don’t know when the segment will be shown but I’ll
try to get word out ahead of time.
In the midst of all this, the DNA and behavior study finally got fully
underway with the arrival on September 13 of Beth Archie who is working with
Susan Alberts, the principal investigator for that project. They are based at
Duke University. Susan was here in July to start the AERP research team (Soila
Sayialel, Norah Njiraini and Katito Sayialel) on a whole new regime of 
behavioral observations, which we are all very excited about. Less exciting is
the dung collection, which is necessary to get the DNA. We’ve actually been
collecting dung from as many individuals as possible for a couple of years now,
but the rate of collection will now be stepped up considerably. (See photo)
Lucky for us and particularly fortunate for the elephants, we don’t have to
use invasive methods to get DNA. Each time an elephant defecates, some cells are
sloughed off in the dung as it passes through the gut. These cells can be
extracted and then analyzed, which is what Beth has been doing for five months
back in the lab at Duke. The study hopes to answer some interesting questions
about how members of a family are related, how families across the population
are related, as well as who the fathers of the calves are, and how the degrees
of relatedness at these different levels may affect behavior.
The drought in Amboseli continues unabated but the elephants are holding
their own for now. A few calves have died in the last few weeks but if the rains
come on time in late October most of the calves should make it. On one of the
mornings we drove out of camp we came upon a very newborn calf who must have
been born only a few hours before. The mother, Orabel of the OA family, was
still bleeding, and the calf, a female, was very stiff-legged and struggling to
walk. In the afternoon, we went out with the Oxygen TV crew to find the calf. We
found Orabel, the new calf, and some helpers from her family in the shallow part
of the Longinye Swamp. Both mother and calf seemed fine (See photo: This is a
photo of Orabel and her newborn calf and her older daughter Ombella who is
helping her take care of it. The calf was born the night of 14/15 September and
in this photo she is less than 24 hours old.). Seeing a
new calf always fills me with both hopes and fears for its future. The world
seems so precarious for elephants. We are doing everything we can to make it as
safe as possible for them. Please help us in any way that you can.
Cynthia Moss, Amboseli National Park
The view of snow-capped Mt. Kilimanjaro from my tent when I was
in Amboseli last week.
