Biodiversity of Forest Elephants (Loxodonta Cyclotis) Diet in the Ogooué Leketi National Park, Congo Brazzaville

Abstract

The Ogooué Leketi National Park (OLNP) is located within the Batéké-Léconi-Léfini Landscape in the central basin of the Congo River. The Ogooué Leketi Elephant Project (OLEP) area is important for biodiversity conservation from its significant populations of forest species (forest elephant, gorillas, chimpanzees, duikers, monkeys, etc.) combined with savanna species (Grimm’s duiker, side-striped jackal, etc). Elephant sign is highest 0.9/km in the northwest of the Landscape in the border area of the Batéké Plateau National Park in Gabon where a number of mineral-rich clearings, or bais, attract forest elephants and others wildlife. Elephants travel a long distance and consume diverse plants and occasionally animals’ species from one clearing to others throughout the forest. This paper intends to provide an overall preliminary list of plants consumed by forest elephants across their feeding trials. The results of the study points to the fact that, elephants were found to be feeding on 258 different vegetal species and three animal species recorded from twenty-six elephants feeding trials from March 2013 to December 2014 through different methods. Among these plant species, 156 were identified by us and checked by botanists in both the CERVE at Brazzaville and herbarium of Kinshasa University. Elephants were not only eating plants but they were also consuming occasionally some invertebrate such as bees, termites and ants. An analysis of 53 dung piles revealed that 43 dung piles had traces of 26 species of fruit consumed by elephants while 10 dung piles had no traces of fruits. The OLNP is among the least described protected areas in the Republic of Congo, despite its speculated high potential biodiversity. This lack of ground-truth knowledge is attributed to the status of the protected area that Congolese government classified as park in 2018 after 14 years of existence.