The 45-year-old Sudan, the sole remaining male of the rare subspecies of white rhino, died in Kenya. By CAMILLA SCHICK on March 20, 2018. Photo by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters.
Biodiversity
Giants Club: African leaders to gather in Kenya to tackle elephant poaching crisis
In the past three years, poachers have killed 100,000 elephants in Africa for illegal ivory markets AFP/Getty Images
By Alex Dymoke
February 26, 2016 / The Independent
The President of Kenya is to host a historic gathering of African leaders in April to address the elephant-poaching crisis in the first meeting of the Giants Club, the wildlife-protection initiative backed by The Independent.
It will be followed by the burning of a vast 120 tonne stockpile of ivory, much of it seized by the Kenyan state from poaching gangs, to show the government’s zero tolerance to the illegal wildlife trade. The blaze will be eight times larger than any ivory stockpile previously destroyed before.
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Biomes and Biodiversity
“Despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems including; global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.” – Dan Lipinski
Should humans be concerned with the extinction rate?
If humans are not concerned with terrestrial or aquatic extinction they should be, especially when it comes to the trophic cascade of the African Forest Elephant which is a keystone species in Kenya. Trophic cascade is defined as the “cascading effect that a change in the size of one population at the top of the food web has on the population below it.” (Turk & Bensel, 2014) Because of the rapid decline of the African Forest Elephant due to human-wildlife conflict other r-selected and k-selected species that rely on elephant activity for their survival will also be affected.
African Forest Elephants are a lot like humans whereas they are family orientated, social, self-aware, mourn the loss of family members, and the calf’s are dependent upon their mother’s milk the first few years of their life. Without their mother or families to protect them it would only be a matter of time before the calf would succumb to the elements or from a broken heart. (Bradshaw, 2004) Because African Forest Elephants gestation period is roughly two years, when herds of elephants are killed by poachers for their ivory the chances of extinction increases as maturity levels for reproduction do not occur until around 15 years of age. Continue reading
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