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Elephant expert working at UCSB5/15/00[The article is reproduced here with Scott Hadly's permission.] Researcher Cynthia Moss is accustomed to sitting in her beat-up Land Rover following families of elephants across the African savanna, but over the last few weeks she has been in Santa Barbara sitting at a computer crunching numbers. The world-renowned elephant expert is in town for a few more days using the computers and computer expertise at UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) to compile the data she and other researchers in Kenya's Amboseli National Park have collected on a band of 1,100 elephants over 30 years. "The resources here are wonderful," said Moss. And working in Santa Barbara isn't too bad either. Although NCEAS is part of UCSB, it is located in downtown Santa Barbara. "Kenya is a beautiful place, but working in the Third World presents its own sort of difficulties," she said. "It can be hard. Santa Barbara is almost like never-never land in comparison." This is the second time in less than a year Moss has been in Santa Barbara taking the information she and her team of researchers have gathered and fine-tuning it on the center's computers. Moss and seven other researchers from Kenya have spent more than a month organizing information that will provide one of the most complete pictures ever of the lives of elephants. "It's unique to have that kind of long-term uninterrupted data," said Moss, director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, based in the small Kenyan National Park on the border with Tanzania. Her work in Santa Barbara is also helping Moss, who has written four popular books about elephants, to finish a definitive scientific book on the Amboseli elephants. A former theater critic for Newsweek magazine with a degree in philosophy, Moss has become one of the foremost authorities on elephants -- not through formal scientific training but through three decades of careful field observations. In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer two years ago Moss said she still considered herself a reporter, "I observe, I question, and I report back." That work, especially her popular books, documentaries and public lectures on the creatures, has helped popularize the plight of the African elephant. The giant mammals have been threatened by ivory poachers and the loss of habitat. In the 1970s and 1980s, poachers killed as many as 147,000 elephants. There are now about 27,000 elephants in Kenya, according to the Kenyan Wildlife Service. Moss' work has also opened up understanding about the complex multi-tiered social lives of elephants, which have large networks of relationships. "They are among the most intelligent mammals," Moss said. In her books, "Echo of the Elephant" and "Little Big Ears: The Story of Ely," she tells the tale of individual creatures -- one, Echo, a 55-year-old matriarch of a family of elephants, and the other, Ely, a baby born with a disability, that struggles to survive during its first year. Such work has won her both praise and helped to rally more support for protecting elephants and for the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species, a treaty to stop the sale of endangered animals. Earlier this year, Moss was named a "Hero for the Planet" by Time Magazine for being a sort of "guardian angel" for elephants. Much of her time now is actually spent lecturing, writing and fund raising, trying to build an endowment for the Amboseli Trust for Elephants. Moss first came to Africa in 1968 to work with leading elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton in Tanzania. She moved to Amboseli in 1972, where she has remained, watching and recording the lives of the large population of elephants there. Over the years she has come to identify and name each elephant by making notes and photographing the profiles and unique markings on their ears. Elephants gather in families of up to 15 that are dominated by the oldest female. Males are forced to leave the family at about 14 when they reach sexual maturity. They then roam until they reach social maturity at about 30. There are 53 families in Amboseli, each one intimately known by Moss. She has also recorded the calls of elephants and found that they are distinct and have meaning. The call used is different for family members than for members of a clan and for elephants outside the clan, Moss said. Her researchers use cards for each elephant, make notations about behavior and the time and place where the elephants were observed. The researchers have also begun to use global-positioning devices and radio collars to track the movements of the species. All that information is being plotted on digital maps using computers at NCEAS. The maps will have overlays showing different kinds of vegetation, water sources and areas of human habitation. Although Amboseli is a wild and protected area, it is only about 150 square miles, while the elephants roam over 2,500 square miles, much of it the lands of the Masai people, Moss said. In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, Amboseli, which means "salty dust" in the Masai language, is a small, safe haven for wildlife that Moss is still working to protect. And her time spent in Santa Barbara will not only help her do that but help scientists everywhere better understand the creatures. "It's exciting work," she said. |
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