When an elephant dies, life is created

As the largest of all land mammals, elephants are known to play an important role in balancing natural ecosystems – and, according to researchers, they also play the exact same role even in death as their bodies decompose and recycle back to earth.

For years, elephants have provided numerous ecosystem services, such as providing food, shelter and water, and helping to create pathways in forests. And these services not only benefit elephants, but other species as well.

However, in partnership with North-West University, South African National Parks launched a study into how large mammals mediate soil characteristics in a nutrient-rich sodic savanna.

“For the longest time we have known them as ecological ecosystem engineers, because without them the whole savanna landscape would look completely different,” said Helga van Coller, researcher at the SA Environmental Observation Network.

“And so, something we realised has not been really considered yet was the question: what would happen if an elephant dies, and how would it translate into the surrounding landscape,” she said.

Elephant carcass affects vegetation

The ongoing research revealed that an elephant carcass changes the vegetation.

“At the fresh carcass site, the nutrients levels are still very high. It’s too toxic for plants to grow and you would then find these big bare patches without any plants growing.

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“As soon at the nutrients stabilise, there comes a green flash of plants at these carcass sites. These changes in the vegetation affect the other animals, where you would see more herbivores and ultimately attract more predators,” Van Coller said.

“We want to see whether elephants get recycled back into the system and whether all of their parts get repackaged into useful nutrients for the biodiversity, or plants and animals in that surrounding.”

Van Coller said there was limited information available on whether long-term herbivore exclusion positively affects bottom-up controls, such as soil chemical properties, and eventually restore and improve natural resources such as soil nutrients and vegetation biomass of degraded semi-arid ecosystems.

She said while the research would end in 2025, so far, it yielded great results, which were already anticipated.

“Findings from this study may enable decision-makers to be prepared for and better understand the anticipated increasing changes in topdown savanna drivers, and how these changes could affect the bottom-up controls of semi-arid savanna ecosystems,” she added.

TB in elephants

Following testing of human-borne tuberculosis (TB) in elephants in the Kruger after one died of the disease in 2016, spokesperson Isaac Phaahla said: “At this stage of research, we’re not sure how it would affect the quality of the soil and vegetation.

“Reason being too little of animals found with TB. So it’s very difficult to tell if there’s going to be an impact.”

Following years of blood testing to screen most of the Kruger’s elephant population, only six to nine percent had showed signs of having being infected.

“We do know though, that if predators were to eat an animal with TB, it gets transmitted to them…” said Phaahla.

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