INTRODUCTION
Forest Elephants of the Central African Republic
The Forest Elephant families are made up typically of a mother and her offspring, usually 3-4 animals. There are some herds that number up to 10. The contact with other groups, mostly relatives, is an important part of their social interaction at Dzanga.
A Forest Elephant female starts breeding at the age of 14, males leave their maternal groups at ages as early as 5 and keep in contact with their maternal groups and are seen greeting them into adulthood.
They have a complex persistent social relationship along with complex communicating systems including visual, haptic, olfactory and auditory elements. The auditory
elements include calls with fundamental frequencies below that of the human hearing capability called infrasound.
Adult females produce most of the calls with a low rumble mostly telling others in a group of location of other groups.
Andrea Turkalo has dedicated most of her life to demographic studies on the Forest Elephant and has identified close to 4,000 individual elephants at Dzanga Bai in the 20 years that she has been working there.
The dense forest of the Congo basin provides few opportunities for game viewing but the Dzanga Bai is an exception. Bai is a Bayaka or Pygmy word for forest clearing with a water source. The attraction of these areas for animals is the abundance of minerals in the soil which are rare in the tropical forest. The Bai’s are also rich in grass and sedge species, quality foods not found in the forest.
In the dry season the Elephant excavate huge holes in the Bai giving them access to the mineral layers. These minerals are thought to act as a buffer of secondary compounds from low quality foods found in the forest, such as leaves.
On an average day one can observe from 40 – 100 elephant in the clearing and the Bai serves as an important area for elephant socialization & reproduction.
The Forest Elephant (Loxodonta Cyclotis) was originally thought to be a sub species of the Savannah Elephant (Loxodonta Africana), but a subsequent study in 2010 has found them to be distinct species.
The Forest Elephant also have a different number of toenails to the Savannah Elephant, the Savannah has 4 on the front & 3 on the hind, whilst the Forest Elephant has 5 on the front and 4 toenails on the hind foot.
Reference – WWF, Andrea Turkalo & Wikipidia.
