There are just not enough elephants in the world. They are going extinct. Too many ivory hunters. Too much habitat destruction.
And too much pollution. A few elephants have died from plastic poisoning -- eating plastic that humans have dumped.
Save the elephant, save the world. Well, that might be going a little far, but they are integral to our ecosystems. Truth said, without elephants, ecosystems would crumble. You'd be surprised at the things they do for the ecosystem.
1. In dry seasons, they use their tusks to bore holes in the ground, creating water holes for themselves and other animals.
2. As they walk through forest area, elephants knock through some trees, creating gaps where sunshine can make it through to new seedlings. Elephants eat from the trees, and stomp down other trees, thus thinning the forest, enabling the surviving trees to grow up taller and larger than those in the rest of the rainforest.
3. While eating large amounts of vegetation, they roam around, spreading seedlings fertilized in their dung, and thus enabling new vegetation.
4. They flatten shrub land to create savannahs, enabling predators to see their prey easily and hunt efficiently.
5. Their dung? The dung of an elephant is food to a baboon, who pick the seeds out of it, and the remaining dung feeds the dung beetles.
6. All living things are made of carbon, and the larger the animal, the more it stores. And the longer it lives, the longer it stores that carbon. At one point, an estimated 26 million elephants roamed the earth. And today? There are less than a half million. That's a lot of carbon.
Did we say it might be going a little too far to say, "Save the elephant and you save the world"? Well, not everyone sees it that way. The group Wildlife Survivors calls the elephant a keystone species (along with the honeybee), and suggests the planet cannot survive without it.
(Index -- Climate change info)
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