The Distribution, Abundance and Status of Elephant in the Serengeti Region of Northern Tanzania

The importance of elephant (Loxodonta africana Blumenbach) in East African ecosystems stems from the animal's great size and its high mean ages of survival in most populations. These two factors enable the species to make relatively massive interventions (in terms of a diversion of energy flow) in an ecosystem, which may be of a long-term nature. These factors are also responsible for time lags of several years or decades in the response of an elephant population to self-induced environmental changes. In East African situations, where a rapidly expanding human population is maintained by an essentially subsistence economy, changes in land-use patterns are resulting in continuous contraction of habitat available to elephant, which serves also to cut off certain channels of response such as emigration and dispersion, at the same time as increasing the amplitude of response to levels ultimately threatening the population's survival. These aspects of the ecology of elephant in modern East Africa are responsible for much of the attention currently focused on the animal (Laws 1966, 1967a, b). This investigation was carried out against such a background, by means of systematic observations of elephant in the Serengeti region (between latitudes 1?S and 3?30'S, and longitudes 33?50'E and 36?00'E) of northern Tanzania from 1962 to 1965. Censuses were carried out in 1965, 1966 and 1967 under our direction, and the results have been incorporated into the general findings.