In elephants, the resilience of communities has its limits
摘要
一项针对斯里兰卡野生亚洲象为期12年的观察研究发现，当象群成员持续减少且损失速度超过新成员加入时，象群社会并非只是规模缩小，而是出现结构断裂。此前对非洲草原象的长期研究曾显示，象群在盗猎等死亡高峰后能逐步重建失去的联系。新研究提示，这种社群韧性在面对长期累积的损失时可能存在限度。
Elephants live in some of the most complex and resilient societies in the animal kingdom. Individuals die or move away, calves grow up, and newcomers join, but the local communities as a whole usually hold together. Long-term studies of African savanna elephants have shown that, even after poaching or other spikes in deaths, survivors tend to rebuild their lost connections over time. But a new study suggests that resilience may not keep the community intact when steady losses accumulate over time.
Anastasia Madsen, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues analyzed 12 years of observations of wild Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. They found that, once losses began to outpace newcomers, the elephants’ society didn’t just get smaller. It fractured.
Accidental savanna
Udawalawe National Park in southern Sri Lanka was created in the 1970s around a reservoir on one of the country's four major rivers. “Before that, it was basically a tropical deciduous forest,” said Shermin de Silva, an ecologist at UC San Diego and senior author of the study (de Silva started the Udawalawe Elephant Research Project in 2006).
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