Longer lives for wild elephants
 |
| A recent study suggests that elephants born in zoos have significantly shorter lives than elephants living in their native habitats. |
| Cynthia Moss/ATE |
Most people think up zoos as safe havens for animals, where struggles so much as difficulty determination food and avoiding predators don't be. Without so much problems, animals in zoos should live to a ripe years.
But that may non beryllium true for the largest land animals on Earth. Scientists have known that elephants in zoos often put u from poor health. They germinate diseases, joint problems and behavior changes. Sometimes, they even become infertile, or unable to have babies.
To learn more about how captivity affects elephants, a squad of multinational scientists compared the life spans of female elephants born in zoos with female elephants living outdoors in their native lands. Zoos keep detailed records of all the animals in their care, documenting factors such atomic number 3 birth dates, illnesses, weight and death. These records made it possible for the researchers to psychoanalyse 40 years of information along 800 African and Asian elephants in zoos across Europe. The scientists compared the life spans of the zoo-natural elephants with the biography spans of thousands of pistillate wild elephants in Africa and Asian elephants that work out in logging camps, over about the same time period.
The team found that young-bearing African elephants born in zoos lived an average of 16.9 years. Their wild counterparts World Health Organization died of natural causes lived an middling of 56 geezerhood – Thomas More than threefold as long. Female Asian elephants followed a similar pattern. In zoos, they lived 18.9 years, spell those in the logging camps lived 41.7 years.
Scientists father't thus far know why violent elephants seem to fare so much better than their zoo-raised counterparts. Georgia James Neville Mason, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada WHO led the study, thinks stress and obesity English hawthorn be to pick. Zoo elephants don't get the unchanged kind of exercise they would in the inhospitable, and well-nig are obese. Elephant social lives are also much different in zoos than in the wild, where they reverberant in large herds and folk groups.
Another finding from the study showed that Asian elephants born in zoos were more likely to die new than Asian elephants captured in the wild and brought to zoos. Mason suggests focus in the mothers in zoos might cause them to have babies that are less likely to survive.
The hit the books raises close to questions about acquiring more elephants to keep in zoos. Piece some threatened and endangered species living in zoos reproduce with success and wield healthy populations, that doesn't appear to be the subject with elephants. "Currently, zoos are net consumers of elephants, not final producers," Mason says.
Going Deeper:
0 Response to "Longer lives for wild elephants"
Post a Comment