Central Africa has lost 95% elephants in 50 years: Expert

Nagpur: Central Africa has lost 95% of its elephants in last 50 years, most of them poached primarily for their tusks, said Dr Samuel Wasser, professor in the department of biology and director of the Centre for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, here on Tuesday.

Dr Wasser said these words while giving a speech on ‘Combating Wildlife Trafficking’ at Raman Science Centre, near Gandhisagar, Mahal. The event was organized by RSC and US Consulate General, Mumbai.

Elaborating his experience on protecting the African elephants and pangolins from poaching, he said, “I worked in Central Africa studying ways to stop poaching. To combat poaching, we needed to know where it was happening. For this, we extracted the DNA of elephants from tusks and dungs to figure out the main areas of the crime.”

“Pangolins, unlike elephants, are small animals. Once we had found an illegal shipment of 13 tonnes of pangolin scales, which means 38,000 pangolins had been killed.”

He explained the modus operandi of traffickers and strategies to combat the same to save wildlife all over the world. Dr Wasser explained the process of developing non-invasive tools for monitoring human impacts on wildlife, methods to measure the abundance, distribution and physiological condition of wildlife from their faeces, relying on detection dogs to locate these samples over large wild areas which were pioneered by him.

Programme coordinator Vijay Shanker Sharma spoke about depleting wildlife diversity in the world.

The centre was packed with people, majority of whom were students. “It is wonderful to see such a young crowd who are willing to know more about wildlife and how it can be protected,” said Tasneem Kalsekar, senior cultural affairs advisor, US Consulate.

Anchor and education officer RSC Abhimanyu Bhelave said, “We organized this event to inform people about how important the issue is and its consequences on the wild animals,” he said.

Dr Amit Majumdar, Dr Sheshrao, Baba Deshpande, Dr Pradnya Giradakar, Pandurang Pakhale, Mandar Pingle, Dr Bahar Baviskar, Jayant Khedkar, Chhand Vaibhav and Dr Anand Manjarkhede were among the dignitaries present on the occasion.

Education officer Vilas Chaudhari proposed a vote of thanks. Anupa Godse, cultural affair specialist, US Consulate, took efforts to arrange the lecture.

(Reporting by Shristi Sankrit)