Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 47
E NV I RO NM ENT
|
COURTES Y OF GO RONGO S A N AT IONA L PAR K
A number of pioneering studies throughout SubSaharan Africa over the past several years showed a
solution that was simple and natural: bees. As it turns
out, the tiny, ubiquitous honeybee has the power to terrify a mammal that’s 22 million times its size.
In fact, even the sound of the insect’s buzz is enough
to send a family of elephants into a panic, showed studies by Lucy King, an Oxford zoologist and preeminent
researcher in human-elephant coexistence at the nonprofit Save the Elephants. Upon hearing the telltale hum,
elephants will run, kick up dust, and shake their heads as
if trying to swat the bees out of the air, trumpeting distressed warnings to other elephants as they flee.
Of course, a bee’s stinger can’t penetrate the thick
hide of an elephant. But when bees swarm—and African
bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting
an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk,
the mouth, and eyes. And it hurts.
Building on King’s insights, Paola Branco of the
University of Idaho conducted a massive two-yearlong experiment in Gorongosa that culminated in a
2019 paper she co-authored with King, Marc Stalmans,
Gorongosa’s director of scientific services, Princeton
zoologist Robert Pringle, and others.¹ Their research
aimed to settle tensions between human farmers and
GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
the park’s growing population of marauding pachyderms—with the help of bees.
Although elephants are peaceful by nature, they can
and will trample grain, swipe crops, topple down silos,
and knock down entire houses. Given half a chance,
elephants from the fenceless sprawl of Gorongosa
in the Lower Rift Valley will steal across the Pùngué
River—which acts as the southern border between the
million-acre park and the rest of rural Mozambique—
stomping into villages in search of a meal.
Humans share blame in the squabble. Natural habitats for elephants are rapidly being tilled into croplands,
encroaching on food sources, often leaving the animals
little choice but to ransack and steal. And while the
population of African elephants has been precipitously
dropping, the number of humans in Sub-Saharan Africa
continues to skyrocket, rising from 930 million in 2012
to 1.2 billion in 2022, data from the World Bank show.
The result is that elephants and people are often
competing for the same resources. The animals—
which typically eat about 300 pounds of vegetation a
day—can decimate an entire farm’s harvest overnight.
In a way, it’s not a terrible problem to have, says
Gonçalves, who grew up in the town of Beira, a few
hours away from Gorongosa.
BUZZ OFF Buckets of bees are strung on a fence wire along a river in Mozambique. When elephants trip the wire,
bees swarm out of the boxes. The elephants hightail back to where they came from.
45
