Human Elephant Research Articles

Determinants of human–elephant conflict in a land‐use mosaic

Summary 1. The resolution of direct conflict between humans and elephants in Africa has become a serious local political issue in recent years, and a continental conservation problem. ‘Problem elephants’ damage crops, food stores and water sources, and sometimes threaten human life. 2. Eighty per cent of the African elephant's range lies outside formally protected areas, and inadequate management of human–elephant conflict is frequently a precursor to further decline in the numbers and distribution of elephants. Conflict appears to be increasing in an assortment of African ecosystems as the agricultural interface with elephant range expands. 3. The present study recorded incidents by problem elephants in small subdivisions of a 15 000 km2 elephant range. The level of problem elephant activity over 3 years showed huge variation and could not be explained by elephant density, proximity of a protected area, area of human settlement, human density or local rainfall. 4. It is proposed that the irregular and unpredictable nature of human–elephant conflict incidents in the study area mainly depended upon the behavioural ecology of individual elephant bulls. 5. This study proposes a statistic to quantify problem elephant activity in Africa which can be used to compare the intensity of problem incidents between different ecosystems at different times: ‘elephant incidents per square kilometre of human settlement area per year’. Spatial analyses of appropriate data at the human–elephant interface may yield a more predictive understanding of the conflict process.

Predicting human elephant conflict

Reviews the establishment of AfESG's Human-Elephant Conflict Task Force (HETF) and its initial concerns and approaches to the problem. Looks at problems of predicting potential elephant-human conflict in nonagricultural as well as agricultural areas and suggests assessing maps using overlap between elephant range (excludng protected areas) and high densities of human population would be useful.

Neural control of interlimb oscillations

Behavioral data concerning animal and human gaits and gait transitions are simulated as emergent properties of a central pattern generator (CPG) model. The CPG model is a version of the Ellias-Grossberg oscillator. Its neurons obey Hodgkin-Huxley type equations whose excitatory signals operate on a faster time scale than their inhibitory signals in a recurrent on-center off-surround anatomy. A descending command or GO signal activates the gaits and triggers gait transitions as its amplitude increases. A single model CPG can generate both in-phase and anti-phase oscillations at different GO amplitudes. Phase transitions from either in-phase to anti-phase oscillations or from anti-phase to in-phase oscillations can occur in different parameter ranges, as the GO signal increases. Quadruped vertebrate gaits, including the amble, the walk, all three pairwise gaits (trot, pace, and gallop), and the pronk are simulated using this property. Rapid gait transitions are simulated in the order--walk, trot, pace, and gallop--that occurs in the cat, along with the observed increase in oscillation frequency. Precise control of quadruped gait switching uses GO-dependent modulation of inhibitory interactions, which generates a different functional anatomy at different arousal levels. The primary human gaits (the walk and the run) and elephant gaits (the amble and the walk) are simulated, without modulation, by oscillations with the same phase relationships but different waveform shapes at different GO signal levels, much as the duty cycles of the feet are longer in the walk than in the run. Relevant neural data from spinal cord, globus pallidus, and motor cortex, among other structures, are discussed.