What Happens When Forest Elephants Are Wiped Out in an Ecosystem?

As go the elephants, so go the trees. That's the message of a new study published in the May 2013 issue of Forest Ecology and Management that found more than a dozen elephant-dependent tree species suffered catastrophic population declines in new plant growths after forest elephants were nearly extirpated from their ecosystems. The fruit-bearing trees all rely on forest elephants as their primary means of seed distribution, a process known as megafaunal dispersal syndrome.The study was conducted in Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a region where more than 98 percent of the forest elephants ( Loxodonta cyclotis ) have been killed by poachers over the past few decades. "As an ecologist studying plant-animal interactions, I was really worried about elephant survival and the plants that had coexisted with them for a million years," says the paper's lead author, David Beaune , a research associate with the Biogeoscience Laboratory at the University of Burgundy in France and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "I started to assess the trees that required elephants for seed dispersal, and I became increasingly worried with time when I did not find any evidence of new growths. We decided then to study if those plant species were able to survive without their seed dispersal partner, the elephant." [More]